


Fate-Anchored Hands

by pensword



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition, The Legend of Drizzt Series - R. A. Salvatore
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Injuries, Canon-Typical Violence, Diverges at the end of Timeless, Dragon Age-centric, Fade Rift Shenanigans, Family Issues, Fearlings (Dragon Age) as Spiders, Fix-it fic, Found Family, Gen, Pre-Dragon Age: Inquisition - Trespasser DLC, nonlinear plot (of a sort)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:27:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 58,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24458188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pensword/pseuds/pensword
Summary: Zaknafein wasn't dead.And apparently on Faerun he was the only one who celebrated that.Brought back to the world he'd been born on, he came to realize that being returned here wasn't a homecoming.At least, the home he'd hadbefore. Before he'd died, and came back years earlier on a different world. Before he'd lived and made a family of true companions on Thedas as the leader of the Inquisition.And so when demons again surround him, he makes a daring leap and returns to his true home. But problems discovered on Faerun aren't so easily left behind.—AU, Dragon Age: Inquisition crossover, featuring Zaknafein as Inquisitor. Canon-compliant (more or less) through the Dragon Age: Inquisition main game, taking place post-game and pre-DLC. Opens in medias res in the final chapter of Timeless.
Comments: 73
Kudos: 35





	1. Now: Faerun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was started during NaNoWriMo 2019: needless to say, it got out of hand. I’ve edited as best I could, but, enjoy any NaNoisms that slipped through!

_Don’t look back_.

Demons howled around them, the air around them shuddering and crying as more and more called in allies from the Abyss, until it seemed the castle was pressed full to bursting with beings from the Abyss hunting their blood, chasing after the two drow on the unicorn, neither of whom should have been here.

One of whom was only here because he had been, and he felt a pang, one he tried to push down. It wasn’t relevant. Not now, and maybe not ever; it didn’t mean anything, that Zaknafein came for him into this hell. It didn’t change what he was, how they were too intrinsically different to be anything more than blood kin, something that mattered nothing.

_Don’t look back_.

If he looked back and saw all those demons, he would know that they couldn’t make the gate, that they were going to die here, and if the slashing claws of the demons didn’t kill them they would simply be crushed to death by the mass of them.

And all of this would have been for nothing. His friends who’d already died would have died for nothing. The demons would overrun the Sword Coast, and more of his friends - his love - would die.

They had to make the gate.

_Don’t look back._

Jarlaxle was far ahead of them, clearing the path with his Nightmare, flames shooting out each time the demonic horse’s hooves stuck the flagstones. Zaknafein’s breath was harsh against his ear, panting in and out with each stride of Andahar. He hadn’t seen how his - how Zaknafein had been wounded, but even a drow weaponmaster couldn’t fight off two maraliths with nothing but a scimitar and a whip and come out unscathed.

He should know.

That worry too, he pushed down as far as it would go. They could address it - and nothing else - when they reached a safe haven (they _would_ reach a safe haven, if he thought otherwise they were all lost). It was enough Zaknafein was clinging on, was shifting his weight with the unicorn as if he’d been made to ride this mount. Impossible. Drow favored their lizardmounts, when they rode anything at all, and Zaknafein had been no lizardrider.

_Don’t look back_.

The mantra rolled with every galloping stride, a flurry of hoofbeats. Drizzt clung to Andahar’s white mane, crouching so low over the unicorn’s neck that he was leaving bloody smears along the pristine white fur, and he knew full well that the only reason he wasn’t feeling more than a brief stab of pain in his wounds as Andahar’s hooves hit the ground was because his blood was running too hot and fast for him to feel anything else.

Something - he didn’t see what it was, just caught the flash of movement - clawed for them, and Andahar was a beast summoned by magic, strong and tireless, but the unicorn was still mortal in many ways. He shied, and suddenly Jarlaxle wasn’t ahead of them, it was the side wall of the castle, and a pack of demons rushed to fill the gap Jarlaxle had created. Andahar wheeled again, turning in a tight circle to lash at the press of demons with hooves and horn and teeth, but there were too many of them.

He yanked on Andahar’s reins in a way he regretted but he had to turn the unicorn, had to spur him back towards the main gate and not deeper into the castle bailey. Tipping his head to glance over his shoulder, he snapped “Blades,” at Zaknafein. If there was one thing the weaponsmaster was good at, it was using his sword to cut a way free.

Zaknafein’s eyes were tired, lines of weariness and tension radiating out from the corners of his eyes and his jaw. Like all elves, drow didn’t show their age, but at four hundred, he was middle aged, and at this moment looked like each one of those years weighed on him. He didn’t know why that useless - and incorrect, he doubted Zaknafein had a moment of regret in his life - detail struck him, but the recognition seemed to make the moment stretch too long, as if the demons had stopped clawing for them for a moment.

_Pain_. A slash of fire up his leg, he nearly buckled, because the demons _hadn’t_ stopped clawing at them. Andahar pranced to the side, reared to kick at the demon, and he would have gone over the side of Andahar’s shoulder if Zaknafein hadn’t grabbed for him and hauled him back; a near thing, near enough Zaknafein’s arm was trembling around him from the exertion.

The muzzy thought crystallized in his mind, a coldness running under all the heat of the pain: he wasn’t the only one wounded.

The demon slashed again, and this time it wasn’t his blood on Andahar’s shoulder; the unicorn screamed in pain, and his heart twisted with regret. So many regrets. It wasn’t fair for Andahar to die for him, or at worst fall into the hands of the demons. And whatever he felt for his father - for Zaknafein, he refused to give him the relationship even now at the end - it wasn’t right that he die so soon after coming back to life, no matter what he actually deserved.

“Maker _damn_ this,” Zaknafein snarled.

He couldn’t catch his breath. Otherwise he would have asked _what maker_. He’d been unmade in the acid so long ago; did he mean that after his death something had re-made him? It was a strange time to be curious about it, when he hadn’t been all while Zaknafein had been living in his home. It hadn’t mattered then, not when his beliefs mattered far more, and it probably mattered even less now.

Zaknafein settled forward, reached around him and grabbed Andahar’s reins, his other arm wrapping tighter around his chest and holding him closer against him. “We are going to live,” he growled, so soft Drizzt wondered if he’d been meant to hear it, or if it was only because it was practically in his ear.

He spurred Andahar, the unicorn flinching away from the vicious heels, following the harder tug of the reins. Not towards the gate, but deeper into the bailey. Andahar’s muscles bunched under him, and Zaknafein urged him straight into the worst pack of demons; the unicorn tensed, then leaped clear over their heads, landing in what was perhaps the only clear patch of ground left in the bailey.

Movement from the side, a demon rushing in. He felt Zaknafein knee Andahar, a subtle flexing on the reins he only noticed because they were still in his hands too, urging the unicorn to cross-step away. That wasn’t just a rider’s instinct; that was the instinct of someone very good on horseback, used to _fighting_ with a mount. _When_ …?

There was a wall in front of them, trapping them - no. He lifted his head, as much an effort as wielding a sword just now. There wasn’t a wall, there was a set of narrow steps, and Zaknafein was ruthlessly driving Andahar towards it. If he didn’t trust that Andahar would be able to scramble up those steps, he showed every intention of making it possible on sheer will alone. “Blades,” he agreed shortly.

Drizzt nodded, and reached deep inside him for the very last stores of his strength, pushing away all the pain, the useless quivering of his leg, and drew his sword. The stairs were narrow, and they might be exposed to anyone with a bow or crossbow, but they would only be facing one at a time.

Where they would go from the stairs, though? The pain had cleared enough for him to think the way Zaknafein had once carefully taught him, to look and judge terrain and distances and play throughout the fight in his mind, and think about where he needed to go to keep the fight on his terms, keep him from being boxed in and helpless.

Strange: he’d thought about Zaknafein’s teachings every day of his life, even as his memories of his father doing the teaching had faded. As they should, with the fading of a child’s perspective of someone who’d only had power over him, and never true affection (if he’d ever loved him why did he reject him now when it mattered most?)

Whatever he felt towards the world around him, Zaknafein urged Andahar up the steps, hooves clattering and skidding, at least one time only held up because of Zaknafein’s iron will and steady hands on the reins collecting him, and didn’t stop until he reached the broad walkway of the battlements. There he reined in at last, and gave a sharp look out over the bailey, seething with demons who had just figured out where they’d gone and were rushing the steps. “This seems somehow familiar,” he remarked, again so low Drizzt looked over his shoulder sharply, not sure if the comment had been meant for him.

If it had, Zaknafein ignored the unspoken question. His right hand on his sword, he dropped the reins and lifted his left to tug off his glove with his teeth.

And green light _flashed,_ so bright Drizzt had to look away, no matter he’d been on the surface better than a hundred and fifty years. Something sizzled and popped, like a fire contained and angry about it, and so close it was impossible. As impossible as the light.

Zaknafein pushed him off Andahar, and he barely managed to land on his feet; his leg nearly buckled again, and he got his first good look at the angry slash down his thigh, the red wound bleeding freely, soaking his trousers, already a dangerous edge of black line around it. Was that a demon that held poison in its claws? Or did it not matter, when it seemed he’d bleed to death first?

He steadied himself on Andahar’s shoulder and the battlement, and looked over the side to freedom. Jarlaxle was there, curving his Nightmare around with what could only be dismay. He could do much good, Drizzt knew that, knew that Jarlaxle always had another trick up his sleeve.

Evidently, so did Zaknafein.

The weaponmaster dismounted smoother than Drizzt had, his eyes not for the outside, but the inner bailey. His face was set and grim, tracking the demons that were bounding towards the steps, one of them already surging up the first few; he nodded, a brief inclination somewhere between him and Andahar. “Send your unicorn away, boy. We’re not going to want him here for this.”

Perhaps he meant to jump for freedom, and trust Jarlaxle had some way of keeping them from breaking their necks. It was as likely a plan as any, and either way, Drizzt took the chance to save the unicorn from the death they were still threatened with. He managed a hobbling step back, and gently blew Andahar’s summoning whistle to send him back home.

The light flared again, a surge of green casting eerie shadows, and the crackling sound almost covered over Andahar’s hoofbeats receding from the material plane. He looked, and Zaknafein was smiling at the demon that had just gained the top of the battlement, left hand flexing at his side as if he still held a whip in it. This time, there was nothing soft or tired about him, just the hard strength of a weaponmaster in his prime, and something else. Something Drizzt had never seen in his father’s eyes before - something terribly colder than bloodlust, an iron will to triumph.

“Here’s something you can’t do,” he muttered, and shoved his left hand towards the demon - no, towards the sky just before the demon.

The green light blossomed out from Zaknafein’s hand, arching up into the sky, like a tree of lightning, twisting and stabbing. Magic. It had to be magic, but Zaknafein had never thought much of what he’d termed “wizard tricks”, openly scorning them in favor of what could be done with a blade. When had he…?

The crackling grew louder, and then shifted into a pained screech as the green light flashed one more time -

\- and the world warped. Green power - too uncontrolled and unhappy to be magic formed into a spell, and certainly not one Catti had ever shown him - twisted and writhed in the air like a living thing, stabbing out crystals into the world that melted back into something like green quicksilver slicked through the air, growing larger by the second. And, in a thin sliver just inside the pulsing green power, he could just make out…

A fiery arm thrust out of the rim of green power, shaped as though someone had set a golem’s arm on fire and the iron had contained it without melting, tipped with three impossibly long claws, all of it red and orange and throwing off heat simmers. A monstrous head and shoulders followed, thrusting its way into the world like some hideous parody of a birth. It dropped to the battlements, and flowed upward - it couldn’t be called _standing_ , not when the deep red and bright gold of molten rock glowed around it like a pedestal that curved up into a hunch of muscle, only two glowing eyes piercing the faceless head.

Zaknafein gave a shout that rang with pleasure. “I’ve never been so happy to see a Rage demon drop out of a Fade rift,” he said, and ferocity ran through the pleasure in his voice. He swept his hand out again, the green magic sparking, a whip of power cracking through the air. “Chew on some of this _rage_ ,” he shouted.

The - what had he called it? The Rage demon? - screamed, a sound of bubbling fire that contained all the fury that a fire elemental usually couldn’t express, more wrath in its voice than even the great primordial of Gauntlegryn ever sounded. That was simply a force of nature: powerful, but beyond emotion.

This one whirled and fell on the demon that had come too close, long arms lashing forward and sinking into the flesh of the demon. It shook it like a cat with a mouse, growing before his eyes as the demon started turning into ash without first burning. Below, the demons might not care for their allies, might fight each other as much as they fought anyone else, but they surged towards the stairs and the being of fire and rage; it howled back, and slouched forward, the stones sizzling and melting in its wake as it surged like a tide of lava for the top of the steps.

“Let’s go,” Zaknafein said. Drizzt shook himself, clearing away his entrancement with the crackling magic and the seething forms of the demons; pain raced back in to fill the gap, so much worse than when he’d forgotten about it for those brief minutes. And this time he couldn’t catch his breath for a shocking moment, had to work to put the pain back where it couldn’t reach him, couldn’t slow him, just the way the monks had taught him. He didn’t entirely succeed.

Zaknafein had already turned his back on the demons and strode off down the battlements. Drizzt staggered as he tried to take a step, and before he could try another, Zaknafein had ducked and set his shoulders under Drizzt’s arm, sheathed sword bumping between them as he urged him on, half-dragging when his leg refused to carry his weight. “It’ll bring friends because there’s plenty of rage in this place, but they’re not overly powerful,” he continued grimly. “But if they call a Pride Demon out to play, or an Arcane Horror, we’re going to die a more interesting death.”

“I don’t - what is that thing?” Drizzt said, limping as he tried to run, tried to help Zaknafein keep the pace.

“Later,” his father said shortly. He looked weary again, and the magic in his left hand crackled - this close, he saw the quick tightening of his mouth, in pain or distaste. “There’s another set of stairs at the other end of this wall, over the gate,” he continued, quick, sharp words to relay the plan. “The Rage demon will fight all the others, it’s compelled to, draw the fight to that side. It’ll be a distraction for us.”

He’d had a plan. Cold, icy relief washed down Drizzt’s spine. They might not die here after all.

They’d just stepped onto the broader stones over the gatehouse, and he had to look down to scramble up the slight slope that made the arch of the gate. He looked up, and ahead of them, a glabrezu stepped onto the battlements from the staircase they’d been making for. It snapped the crab-like pincers that ended each of its arms and took a step, filling the walkway with its sheer size, and he was too wounded to use its size against it and slip past. Zaknafein, however, could. It was even the way of the drow, and he tried not to be disappointed that the man who’d given him life wasn’t a better example of it.

“Or they could find it first and box us in,” Zaknafein said, so wryly dry Drizzt managed a rasping laugh even as he waited for his arm to drop from Zaknafein’s shoulders.

Instead, Zaknafein’s sword hilt bit into his hip, and he tightened his grip; against his side, Drizzt felt tension rippling through Zaknafein’s body, like a fly-bitten horse, sensed him weighing the odds of the fight in front of them or the fight behind them, taking that moment to find a way through the impossible. But he didn’t let go. Whatever his flaws, and he knew them better than most, Zaknafein didn’t back down from a fight or a challenge, even when there was an easy way out.

He just took the easy path in the rest of his life, Drizzt thought scornfully, stayed in Menzoberranzan instead of escaping when he had the chance, and let the corruption of that foul city rub off onto his soul. And then dared claim that he had the right of it.

The moment Zaknafein came to a conclusion, he felt it rush through him, the way Zaknafein breathed out a long breath that was nearly a sigh, some of the strength collapsing into his chest, like an opened hollowness. Memory stirred under him, the aching knowledge he had always known but so rarely thought about; it had been too big in the Underdark, would have drowned him if he hadn’t pushed it away, chased it away. And once he’d come to the surface, it hadn’t mattered as much. But it mattered now.

_His heart had been cut out_.

And he’d let it happen, seen no other way to victory than through sacrifice.

Drizzt heart hammered in his chest, pulsing to pain and fear, spiking up from his leg and twisting around him, too much to bear. He wouldn’t. It _was_ the easy way, but there was no purpose here…well. No purpose, aside from an escape from more than just this castle. Had he been brought back to life only to wish to cast it aside again?

“A more interesting and less-certain death,” Zaknafein murmured under his breath, and before Drizzt could imagine what he could have meant, his hip and shoulder slammed into him, weight and strength enough to make his leg collapse out from under him again. And Zaknafein used that motion to force them through a pivot, awkward and painful and would have undoubtedly lead to their deaths in a real fight, but faster than he would have been able to manage limping.

“Run,” Zaknafein snarled in his ear, hands tightening on him, tugging and pulling as he started forward; he couldn’t keep up, not with his leg still bleeding freely, leaving smears of blood across the stones of the battlements, and Zaknafein seemed more than willing to drag him. It was just dangerously slower. Drizzt scrambled, got his feet halfway under him, and if Zaknafein was bearing most of his weight, he managed to at least limp a stride or two at his side.

Behind them, the glabrezu took another leisurely step, one that made the very stones of the wall tremble. It could have caught them by now, but it knew that it had them pinned between it and the demons below, and it was willing to take its time and stretch out the moment of terror.

“Stairs on a side wall?” he managed, panting out the words. “Or…” It wasn’t a structurally sound castle, after all; that had been what had let the demons infiltrate so thoroughly, because no one poked through a ruin of a castle, or at least not more than once. Was there a _broken_ section of the wall somewhere? He tried to remember, but he’d scouted it so long ago, and had only really been checking to see if there was anyone else who’d taken up residence who’d make him sheltering inside it somewhat more difficult.

“No,” Zaknafein said, and his head was up, not slowing as he approached the tangle of demons fighting on the steps; Drizzt couldn’t see the Rage demon anymore, but one side of the steps was melting, so it seemed it was still alive and fighting everything pressed around it. Movement in the corner of his eye, another crackling surge of green power, and as he watched another Rage demon dropped from the hovering ball of green power. It rushed away from them, towards the first one, and it slithered down the stairs in the wake of the first, as it sliding down an icy path.

Zaknafein made a noise, almost a grunt of approval, and yes, at least the demons wouldn’t be able to attack them from that side now. Not unless they were unharmed by fire, and some weren’t. Still, it gave them a little bit more breathing room, when heartbeats mattered.

One step, and his leg nearly buckled under him again, pain a throbbing mass from his ankle to his hip; Zaknafein hauled, kept him on his feet, but even he was breathing hard, a tremor running up his side. Definitely poisoned, and he couldn’t tell if the weary thought meant _him_ or _Zaknafein_. Probably him, and likely why his thoughts were all over the place, but that particular realization really didn’t help.

“Three more steps,” Zaknafein said, and it sounded like a promise to one of them, or both of them.

The thought cascaded through the mess of pain, and he realized what was wrong with that number: “Three?” Drizzt asked, looking up.

The green ball of power hovered just before them, seething and hissing faintly, like a pot of water put over too hot a flame and turning into steam. This close, the surface of it rippled, mottled green shifting in eerie patterns, surrounding something else. Something that was impossible, but did explain where the Rage demons came from. “It’s a portal?” he managed, just as he managed one more step, then another.

“Of a sort,” Zaknafein said, and soon, he would force out a straight answer from his father. Just not now.

One more step, and they made it together. One more step and Zaknafein gathered himself under his arm, hands digging down through fabric and armor to bruise skin. He lunged, as much up as forward, and Drizzt pushed off from the ground, best he could with his one good leg, the only way he could to help make that desperate leap up and just a little over, just a little forward.

Green light flashed around them, so bright it was pure white, hot as lightening. And pain, pain twisting through him, holding him up in the air, pressed against something that was power and fire and not supposed to be an opening. Behind them, the glabrezu roared in protest, the thunder of its steps echoing through the persistent hissing around them, only now chasing its prey - and that sound made him _hope,_ because if the glabrezu thought they were getting away then just maybe they really were.

Darkness crashed over him, hard as the green light, and he fell to the ground. And with the first scrape of his elbow on a rough spike, the first startled gasp he took of musty, fetid air, he knew the portal had worked, and they had gone somewhere else, somewhere the glabrezu and the other demons couldn’t follow or else they’d already be pouring out atop of them. With any luck, it would be less dangerous, though at this point, knowing himself and his father, he doubted it.


	2. Now: The Fade

Elbow stinging, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the utter darkness, Drizzt gingerly felt the spike he’d hit - rough-textured rather than sharp, a blunt point at the top rather than a narrow, vicious one - and used it to push himself up, then leaned his back against it so that he could stretch his leg out in front of him and tend to the wound.

One hand reaching for a pack to fish out bandages and herbs, he braced himself for the worst and looked down. His hand fell into empty space, but he was more concerned by the fact that he couldn’t see his leg. Or his hand, even when he brought it up and tapped a finger onto the tip of his nose. Not even the sense of movement, a ripple in the air.

The hairs on the back of his neck rising, Drizzt stared into the darkness, willing his sight into the infravision all drow had: even in utter darkness, it turned the world into a bright array of colors, ranging from reds and orange of warmer creatures to the cooler blues of rocks and metals, things that retained enough on their own even without a source of warmth.

But the world stayed black. Had he been somehow blinded by the flash of light? Or by the poison?

Or was there simply nothing to see in this place? If he _was_ in a place, and hadn’t been trapped into a space between planes. _Rift._ Zaknafein had called the thing over the castle a _rift_. A rift that bridged two places? Or a rip that lead into the void between places?

His heart was pounding in his ears, and with an effort, he willed it to slow, willed his racing thoughts to steady, to return to the facts that he knew to be true: this wasn’t the Abyssal fever that had turned his mind to paranoia and delusions, this was just fear, reasonable and excepted, and he had the training of the monastery to guide him. There was a rough stone against his back, probably a boulder of some kind; he pressed his back harder against it, let the edge dig into the small of his back, and the little pinch of pain was real, in a way that his speculations hadn’t been. If he felt pain, then he had a body to feel pain with, and he wasn’t trapped in a void. His eyesight would return, or it wouldn’t, and if it didn’t then it would hardly be the first time he’d fought blind, and he’d had many examples over the years to show him how he might live a full life, even lacking one of his senses.

He just wouldn’t be who he had been before, and he told himself that was nothing to fear, either. Change was, after all, a part of life, a part of the natural world.

But so was fear.

Something skittered over his leg. He jerked back, yelping - the sound small and faded and rushing away from him. A very large cavern? Not a cavern at all, but an empty field? Whatever it had been, it had come from somewhere, gone somewhere, and he held his breath, listening for the subtlest sounds of movement: a rustle in the grass, a soft tap of a footfall on bare ground, a hiss of scales over rock.

Nothing. It was gone as if it had never been. But he _knew_ he had felt it. He twisted his head, searching around him, trying to find a point where the darkness ebbed, straining to hear anything.

Nothing. There was nothing around him, not rock nor wind nor sky. He let out a breath, silent as he could manage when his breath trembled. That also meant there was no creature.

Weight dropped onto his leg, the one that had been wounded, and a long, slender tendril - the leg of a spider, he knew that instinctively - traced up his calf and over his knee. And he still couldn’t see it, though he knew where the eyes would be, the mandibles clicking, thoughtfully vicious. He couldn’t back away any further than he already was, but he tried, feet scrabbling at the hard ground, one hand scrambling back for a weapon, any weapon, why didn’t he still have his, they’d been sheathed at his side but the angle was all wrong and he couldn’t draw them even if he could feel them. He swept out with his other hand, aiming for where it should be on his leg, but only air whistled through his fingers.

Weight on his other leg. Another spider? Still the first? Or was it only the ghost sensation of another spider? He couldn’t tell, just struck out that one too, missed, and he shouldn’t have been surprised by it but his heart was pounding so fast it could only be shock.

The spider that was on his leg - though he couldn’t hit it, couldn’t shake it off, not with his wounded leg, just as he couldn’t get up now - took another crawling step closer, a ripple of legs, a tap of each one of the eight as it advanced.

There was a sharp gust of air, a quick burst rushing in front of his face, and with a pained shriek, the spider fell away, and once it had he couldn’t sense it, even though it should be dead or thrashing with a wound.

But there was only stillness, until even the pounding of his heart and the panting of his breath eased, senses honed and trained for worse to come.

As if in answer, in the distance, a familiar green light flared to life, and the world was quiet enough he could even hear it sizzle and crackle with surging power. His heart seized around hope and fear. Was the rift opening again? Would he be dumped back into the castle full of demons, or somewhere worse?

No.

Zaknafein walked out of the darkness, upheld left hand blazing with that green light, casting his face with an almost sickly glow, the shadows from his hand stretching out behind him, racing away across bare ground. Without the glove, with his sleeve fallen back, Drizzt could see that the green power slashed down across his palm, like a scar that mirrored the shape of the rift he’d opened, and green lines traced down his wrist, twining around his forearm like vines - no. Not vines. They didn’t glow like the light on his palm, but they were the same shade of sickly, over-bright green, nothing of the forest or the field in them.

“There you are,” he said, as if Drizzt had been the one wandering around, lost in a maze of caverns or wherever this place was, and not unable to move.

“What is this place?” he demanded.

Zaknafein walked closer, and the light within his palm washed over him, no warmth to it, just that eerie shade of green. But it was enough to illuminate the rock at his back, a boulder the shape of a fang. And next to him, the black form of a spider, pinned to the ground with a knife speared through its back.

No. Not a spider, not even one that could have come from the Underdark, blessed by Lolth. It wasn’t just Zaknafein’s light that turned it that shade of green; as Drizzt stared, it turned its head towards him, all eight eyes glowing like emeralds as it snapped its mandibles towards him, tried to scramble towards him on legs that ended in hands - still with claws. Just more of them.

The thing that wasn’t a spider, and perhaps never had been, twitched as it surged its body against the blade, somehow not yet dead, hands waving towards him. When it still couldn’t reach, its edges began to blur, legs merging into each other as it turned into mist and started flowing around the knife.

“Not a chance, little Fearling,” Zaknafein muttered, and closed his hand into a fist. The light pulsed between his closed fingers, not bright, and a weight rippled out from him. The thing shrieked again, formless as a shadow, then puffed into smoke and was gone. So, for that matter, did the knife. “That bodes,” Zaknafein murmured around a sigh.

“This is not entirely what I was aiming for,” he said as he finally looked back, and walked over to Drizzt. “But - Welcome to The Fade,” he said, reaching down with his right hand in clear offering.

It was just impossible; Drizzt shook his head, made no move to take Zaknafein’s hand. “I can’t-” he started.

“Your leg is fine,” Zaknafein interrupted. He arched an eyebrow, shadows playing across the wry smile on his lips. “Isn’t it?”

In the light of the green power in Zaknafein’s hand, Drizzt could finally look down, and had to stare: his pants weren’t even torn, much less bloody. He flexed his foot, and it moved easily. He reached down and brushed fingers over where the wound had been, his skin ached under his touch, but not full of pain from the deadly wound. He lifted his fingertips to his face, sniffed: not even the scent of old, dried blood, or of yarrow and mint from a healing potion.

But his leg was definitely healed.

This time when he offered, Drizzt took Zaknafein’s hand, took the offer of strength to help him to his feet, no matter it wouldn’t have been needed. He tested his balance, shifting his weight, and even that felt blessedly normal, not even as if he’d spent the last night and day riding hard and fighting harder. He shook his head again, this time in disbelief. “I don’t understand.”

Zaknafein smiled again, but glanced over his shoulder, left hand flexing, making the light surge and crackle, and reveal nothing around them but empty rock. “This isn’t the place for a long explanation, and I’m not the one to give it,” he said. But when he glanced back, he lifted one shoulder in a small shrug, and gestured to the expanse around them. “But, in brief, the Fade exists beyond the normal realm, everywhere and nowhere all at once. It doesn’t work off the rules of the normal realm; it’s laws are made by beliefs, by dreams and nightmares; so long as you don’t believe your leg is injured, it’s not. Not here.”

He wasn't sure he could believe that - what did Zaknafein know of magic or other realms? - but the evidence was compelling on its own. Drizzt glanced down at where the wound had been again. “And…outside of here?” he asked.

Zaknafein’s eyes were grim, but all he said was, “That is something to worry about once we’re out of here.”

For the first time, Drizzt really looked at Zaknafein, saw that he, too, stood balanced and uninjured, but there was something more. His head was up, and there was calm strength in the set of his shoulders, in the way he looked over their surroundings as if he wasn’t surprised - _couldn’t_ be surprised, not by a spider that wasn’t or the flat blackness that pressed around them, the light from his hand casting a defined circle around them. And there was something faintly different about his garments; not the color, that was still the black and dark grays he’d always favored, not even really the cut, the simple warrior’s jerkin —

—That was cut too long. It fell to his knees now, when in the castle, it had only just covered his hips. More proof of this place, this Fade, being shaped by will?

But why would he imagine his armor longer?

He looked back up into Zaknafein’s red eyes, and wished he could trust him. “Then you know how to get out of here?” he demanded.

Zaknafein was quiet, looking past him, something dark and sad in his eyes. “No, but I know how to find a path that will. Come,” he added, beckoning as he stepped into the darkness in what seemed to be a random direction, not the way he’d come from and not passed the stone Drizzt had been leaning against.

It was all he could do to keep from snorting aloud; Zaknafein had never been a hunter or a tracker, had done all his fighting in the drow Houses of Menzoberranzan and it’s back alleys. If he wanted to think himself a ranger, even in this strange place where he might have a better sense of the world just now, he was welcome to try, and Drizzt would be ready to step in once he failed. For now, he followed in his wake, keeping in the range of the light, and his eyes sharp on everything he could see around him, and his ears straining to hear the approach of another…

“What were those things, the shadow spider?” he asked.

“It wasn’t a spider,” Zaknafein said shortly, not glancing away from wherever it was he thought they were going. “It was a Fearling: they take the form of something you fear, prey on terror far more than flesh.” He glanced over, and almost sighed. “They’re a demon,” he said gently. “A minor sort of one, in the grand scheme of things.”

“I’ve never heard of them,” Drizzt countered, and knew he was being petulant, but… “After the year I’ve had, I should know demons when I see them, and I’ve never encountered a…Fearling before.”

Zaknafein shrugged. “Now you have,” he pointed out with an annoying sort of logic that he couldn’t quite refute the statement, but still knew it was wrong. “Demons and spirits fill the Fade,” he continued. “The demons being the more common of the two, unfortunately. They, like magic, come from here.”

However much he knew that demons came from the Abyss, the other part of that statement was worse. “Magic comes from the Weave,” Drizzt said, pinning all his spinning thoughts on that first thing he knew to be true about magic: the long-ago lessons from Melee-Magthere, the half-year demanded of all fighter students, had taught him little, but it had taught him that much, and he had spent years watching Cattie-brie pluck at its power, seen the glow in her eyes as she explained what it was spells really _were_ , under it all, and it was a delight to hear her even when he only understood one word in three.

Zaknafein glanced at him, and a small smile creased his mouth again, something bright but almost soft in his red eyes. “On Faerun, yes. But not on Thedas.” His smile grew suddenly brighter, and for a moment, his eyes sparked with it, made him look younger. “Where do you think I’ve _been_ all this time?” he asked, gently teasing.

“Dead,” Drizzt admitted.

Zaknafein actually laughed. “For some of it,” he agreed, almost cheerfully. “But not all. Come on,” he said before Drizzt could work his head around that. “We’re nearly to somewhere brighter.”

Not safer, and Drizzt understood the distinction. He still couldn’t see anything besides Zaknafein, the flat, dark world around them, but it wasn’t as though staying here was an option.

And then the wall reared up out of nothing. For a moment as they approached, the light washing over it, it was as if it was the very end of the world, a blackness so complete not even Zaknafein’s light could pierce it. But then he saw the contours of it, how it fit against the ground as if it had been built on a foundation and soared above their heads; he watched the light playing over its surface, puzzling over what he could see, and then all at once, like a trick image unfolding in front of his eyes, he saw that it was craggy and pitted, boulders jutting out and scarred rifts making chasms within it, a cliff wall like any running along the Sea of Swords.

Zaknafein only stopped at its foot, and lifted his hand as high as he could, staring up as if he could see the top of the wall; when Drizzt joined him, all he could make out was more uneven crags within a chimney of black rock. Hand and footholds, if nothing else, but without being able to see the top, they would have to trust that it would lead somewhere they could reach, and wouldn’t leave them stranded halfway up the wall with no way to reach the top.

“Do you recognize this place?” Zaknafein asked softly.

“No,” Drizzt said. “Why would I?” As Zaknafein had so helpfully pointed out, he’d never been here before.

“It looks exactly like the climb to the surface, west of Menzoberranzan and north of Ched Nasad,” he continued, voice still soft, but this time there was a note of wistful regret in his voice, not mere caution. “I had thought you might have used it.”

A line ran down Drizzt’s spine, simple words that still touched his soul. “No,” he repeated, but gentler this time. No, he hadn’t known that particular path to the surface had existed, hadn’t used it when he’d left the Underdark - but Zaknafein clearly had. Whatever softness he’d felt chilled: he’d known where a route to the surface lay, and still he’d stayed in Menzoberranzan, and said there had been no other way. 

Perhaps he hadn’t lied, but nor had he dared to be better.

He turned his back and walked away, pacing down the length of the cliff as far as he could from Zaknafein without leaving the bounds of the light. “Here,” he said, pointing up at a particular jagged-sided chimney carved back into the face of the cliff. “We can climb up this way.”

Zaknafein’s steps were silent, but he could feel him drawing closer regardless, until he stood just at his side, and Drizzt’s skin vibrated with the sense of him almost brushing, and not quite, a gap that drifted closed, but slid farther apart before two opposite sides could touch. “I suppose it would have been too much to give us a ladder,” Zaknafein finally remarked. He reached up, caught the first protrusion, and set his foot onto the side of the wall. “Or a rope,” he added, grunting slightly as he swung up, and reached for the next handhold.

Drizzt had to wait for him to clear the lowest part of the wall before he could start his own climb, but nor could he wait as long as he might have liked, not when Zaknafein quite literally was the only source of light. It made for a long, awkward climb, trying to maneuver his way to the next handhold, without falling too far behind Zaknafein, or bumping into his legs. He was silently grateful each time he set his foot and his leg carried his weight, but he knew full well that if he fell, no matter his good intentions, it would be only natural to believe in broken bones, and then he would be lost in the darkness, waiting for Fearlings and presumably worse to feed on him.

Yes, it was not what he’d term a pleasant climb.

With nothing to mark the time, he had no idea how long they’d actually been climbing when he realized the darkness wasn’t quite as absolute. He swung himself up onto the next foot-hold, and it was large enough he could rest his weight fully on it and take a breath, look up towards Zaknafein, and beyond him, hoping for a glimpse of sun or starlight.

Nothing. Except, as he reached up, Zaknafein gave a relieved grunt, and abruptly scrambled up to where his fingers were hooked over the lip of the wall; he wormed, belly-down, up and over, and whatever was up there, it was large enough he could stretch fully out, and reach down with a hand to help Drizzt up the last few feet. Whether that meant that it was only a larger outcropping, it would let them rest, and for now that would be enough, no matter it would mean too-close quarters.

The light from his hand dimmed briefly as Zaknafein reached down to grab the back of his jerkin and pull him up and over, then flared back out as Drizzt scrambled over the top as well; the light fell away from him, and he greeted the sight with relief as it showed the larger space around him, the walls falling away from them. Trembling faintly and breathing hard, and Drizzt looked up again; not stars above him, but he _could_ see the spiky points of stalactites hanging down, shadows caught deep in their recesses but the ceiling solid over head. At their feet, the place they’d come out of was a dark, gaping hole in the ground, just one more eternal shaft down into the Underdark.

“From here-” he began, because he had somewhat more experience with finding his way through surface caves, then stopped. There was too much of the green light, the shadows flickering while Zaknafein stayed still, seated on the ground and catching his breath. He looked over his shoulder, and started forward along a cavern floor that was too smooth to be natural, heart leaping up with a great bound of hope. Light in caverns meant creatures that needed light, created light, and even if it was the emanations of certain lichen, this smoothed stone meant someone was taking advantage of it - dwarves, he suspected, and he was far more familiar with dwarves than Zaknafein.

He hoped, right up until he rounded a bend in the tunnel, and the surface opened up in front of him.

What amounted to it.

Looking up into the sky, seething gray cut with crawling bolts of green lightning as earthmotes drifted all around, Drizzt felt a frisson of fear crawl down his back. No matter how good a hunter and tracker he was, he couldn't find a way out of a place that was only sky and magic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's NaNoWriMo-ism: apparently spiders have mandrills! This is why editing NaNoWriMo works are so entertaining.


	3. Now: The Fade

Drizzt got up and stormed away, and Zak let him. He probably should worry a great deal more about his son being eaten by a demon, or attracting all kinds of interesting spirits with the resentment and pride he carried like the two swords at his hips - and he would, once he got his breath back and some of his bearings. He barely recognized this cavern; he’d only seen it once, and then he’d been more worried about the band of halflings being eaten when he’d worked so hard to bring them to safety. With luck, that meant that beyond this cavern, the Fade would go back to…well, what passed for “normal” for the Fade, shaped not quite so much by his own mind.

Two drow drop into the Fade; he should have expected that it would be the Underdark they landed in, should have figured that the world would shape itself to his memories rather than Drizzt’s, when he was the one bearing the Anchor, and when he’d just been dragged through so many of them over the last few weeks - tendays, on Faerun. It was hard to remember, sometimes, which bit of knowledge went for which world.

The Fade was depressingly familiar, though.

He heard Drizzt’s sharp gasp, even from down the tunnel, even as only a shaking intake of breath. He could almost, _almost_ smile about it as he got to his feet, almost take that small sliver of cruel pleasure of having that pride battered down a notch. At the very least, Drizzt might not be so quick to shove it down his throat now. He’d never pretended to be humble or entirely magnanimous, even as the Herald of Andraste: he’d never even claimed he _was_ the Herald, had found his other title so much more comfortable.

 _Inquisitor_.

He’d been the Inquisitor at Adamant, and had ended up here. And he’d found his way out, in the end. He held to that thought, let it ripple down his back as he stood, and walked out of the last shard of Faerun.

It had just cost, and he refused to think of that, refused to think of what had been lost, and how; beliefs and memories shaped the Fade, and that was not a shape he would ever see again, not when the Fearlings had been bad enough, nearly made him freeze with terror when he’d heard their legs, heard Drizzt’s racing heartbeat, but the knife had been belief, too, because he always had a knife shoved through his belt in the small of his back. And then it had been only instinct, only what he’d always been on Faerun, and on Thedas.

He walked down the short corridor, and saw the point where the Fade gave up, where the memory gave way and the shape became blurry: the ground smoothing, the walls lightening, the exit of the cavern not anything found on a mountainside, but a near-perfect arch. And when he stepped out, he looked up over the Raw Fade: scattered pieces of mountains of stone drifting through a green-gray sky, brighter-green veilfire cutting through it like lightning flashes, and off in the distance… He raised his hand, saluted the Black City, and turned his attention back to his son.

They’d stepped out onto the lip of this particular shattered mountain, the drop in front of them sheering away to whatever it was that waited below; he’d never gotten a good explanation if, as in the real world, seas seethed and surged below, or if there was just the void. Dirzzt stood next to a spear of rock thrusting up from the edge, gazing into the depths of the Fade.

“As I said,” Zaknafein said as he drew up along side him, not so close to crowd. Drizzt still moved away. “The place where magic comes from.” Perhaps that part would sink in now, with this particular object lesson.

“How do we get out of here?” Drizzt asked, very quietly, not taking his eyes from the mountains drifting through the angry, corrupted sky.

It wasn’t an unwise question; Zak just wished he had a better answer, but Melee-Magthere’s teaching on magic was slim, and even Deshanna Istimaethoriel, the Lavallan Keeper, had despaired of him and his lack of interest. What he knew of the Fade had been gained through bitter personal experience. “The last time I was here, we returned through the same rift we’d opened,” he said. “That isn’t an option this time.” It would just lend them back in the middle of a pack of demons, and they would have only won a few more hours of life.

The other option had just been highly theorized, and he’d honestly only half-listened when Solas had described it. “We have to find an eluvian - it’s a type of mirror,” he said. “Once, they formed a series of portals in the ancient elvhen empire.”

Drizzt nodded. “Then there should be a path to one, and it will be able to lead us out.”

Zaknafein nodded, and bit his tongue around the truth. Technically, the eluvians didn’t open up into the Fade, but the strange world of the Crossroads; they likely only dipped into the Fade, drew on its magic, and so many of them he been destroyed, leaving only the memory and ruin in the world beyond for the Fade to mimic. But short of ripping open another rift through the Fade, drawing the attention of every single demon anywhere in the general vicinity, he didn’t see much else they could do.

The Fade was the realm of magic, shaped by belief. And right now, he would believe that an eluvian that opened on this side of the Fade worked just as well as an eluvian on the other side.

And if Drizzt, setting off along the curve of the mountain, wanted to believe that this was a path, then he was welcome to, and might even help. Zak would worry about those things that he knew to worry about, and try not to taint the world around him with what he couldn’t.

Zak watched his son for a moment, then lifted his head and swept another slow gaze over the floating mountains closest to them, nostrils flaring, as if there were trail-scents here, as if demons wearing the form of halla and wolves would smell like them, too. There was only the faintly lingering brimstone and smoke, and that wasn’t comforting in the slightest. Not when even the spire next to him could be a spirit, taking the form of a rock, and he certainly knew demons could move through the Fade like sharks through water when they scented blood.

Almost as if it sensed and fed off his emotions just as well as demons could, the Anchor on his left hand crackled again, pain shooting up from his palm to his elbow, twisting around the encroaching lines. It was expanding again, just like the Breach had. Another time, Zak told himself, flexing his hand, working his way through the pain. Maybe he just needed Solas to shove it up against a rift again, and he’d only be able to do that if he got out of the Fade in one piece.

He started after Drizzt, and no matter he really shouldn’t have tried, he looked for landmarks besides the Black City. The Fade was ever-changing, but some chunks were ruled by powerful enough demons they stayed firm, and he might not want to skirt through a demon’s territory, but he’d do it, should it lead him to somewhere that let them get out.

If they were very, very lucky, they might come across a sleeping mage he knew - Maker and Mythal knew, he could use Solas right now, and he dearly wanted to hear Dorian’s voice, but at this point, he’d even take the sight of Vivianne’s horned hat, her precise and icy competence worth the bladed politeness that had always been bitter in the back of his throat.

His heart ached around a particular pain, something that had taken him a very long time on Thedas to learn was _homesickness_. And it didn’t help to tell himself that he was going home, one way or another. Or that the Fade counted as home. Not when home wasn’t a place, was just as ephemeral and driven by memories as the Fade was.

Wherever they’d landed in the Fade, this particular chunk held more of the sharp spikes, stabbing up from the crown of the mountain; as they curved around the edge of the area, the path descended, and mercifully moved away from the edge and deeper into this particular chunk of the Fade. He picked up his pace, even as the nape of his neck prickled as the walls rose up higher around them and every instinct in him - honed in the Underdark and particularly in the Western Approach - told him that they were going to be ambushed.

As if he’d sensed it, or merely had the good sense not to forge too far ahead in a strange, mystical place like this - or maybe, a corner of his heart still hoped, there was still an ounce of affection in him - Drizzt had paused, looking over his shoulder for him, at another sort of archway. This one was formed of two spines that had tipped together, forming as much an X as an archway, and beyond it, the path curved and dropped still lower, until he could only make out glimpses of enormous boulders scattered across the scarred valley.

Something amiss here - more than normal in the Fade. If there was only one thing true about this place, it was that everything existed for a reason, and usually that reason was tied to someone or something. His hands itched, and he tucked them on his belt where his swords should be, scanning over the valley floor. “No movement,” he said softly.

Drizzt inclined his head. “There was no other path but this one,” he said, and no matter it was something he’d been able to see himself, that, too, meant something. They were being directed here.

“I very much dislike being lead by the nose into an ambush,” he remarked. He heard Drizzt make another of those careful noises, a laugh he smothered too-late, pleasure he couldn’t quite hide from his eyes when Zak glanced over. “Shall we make them regret it?” he offered,

The pleasure flattened, darkened, and the jerk of his head towards the arch almost felt like a blow, rejecting not just the words but the one who’d said them. “After you,” Drizzt said, and he could have nearly given Vivianne lessons in courtesy that cut.

Put it aside. He had to put it aside, had to focus on his next footstep, on ducking his head through the crossed spines, on scenting the brimstone-ash air of the Fade for something that didn’t belong. The passage narrowed as he advanced, and if it was never a pleasant experience, at least the sides were utterly sheer, without even an outcropping of the strange green-laced crystals that he’d seen elsewhere in the Fade: nothing, not even the hardiest Hinterlands ram, was getting up or down that way. _Except for the things that could fly_ , too-many memories prompted. He turned his attention back to the downward slope of the path before he could dwell any farther on things that could kill them so much easier right now.

A few more steps, those walls fell away, the path turning into a bridge over a chasm that probably reached all the way down to where they’d been before - and when he looked up again, caught the illusion of water on stone off to the left, his senses honed again. Yes, this place was familiar, but there had been so many places on Thedas with a bridge, and sometimes that bridge had even been in one piece.

There were even places where there was a ruin just to the left of the road, a village destroyed a month or a year or a decade ago. A fog rose up from the ground as he stalked closer, swirling with gray and green around the ruins, and around him, the Anchor making little ripples of light cascade out from him as it brushed through the fog; like being a giant and walking through the Storm Coast, though that wasn’t this place, not when he knew that he would have been able to hear the surf booming against the cliffs, even in the Fade, and the villages there —

“They’re dying!” Drizzt snapped, shouldering past him, cutting a trail through the fog that rose still higher, up to his shoulders. He looked back sharply, accusation in his purple eyes. “Are you going to help?” he demanded. He didn’t wait for a response, just turned around and plunged deeper into the fog.

It wrapped around him, and he could hear it, now, could smell it: raging fires, ash in his nose, burning his eyes, the scent of cooking flesh burning his heart, ancient timbers cracking and crashing to the ground, screaming civilians and horses…

And though muffled by the fog, Cullen’s voice rose up from deep within the village, steady because he’d seen so much worse, shouting through the smoke, calling the soldiers to their posts. Muffled as the tramping of far too many boots coming towards them, the earth quivering under his feet from more than the tavern collapsing in on itself.

This was _Haven_. Haven, right as Corypheus brought the might of the Red Templars down on them.

And Drizzt was running into the middle of that mess of a battle, running straight for the stables - just in front of the main gates, they’d be first hit and burned worst.

“You can’t save them!” he shouted, and plunged after his son. In dreams he had tried, and even in dreams he had failed. And this was the Fade, born more of nightmares than dreams.

Figures rose out of the fog, ghosts that he had known, and some he’d forgotten, and some he’d never known the names to but their eyes still haunted him. _Herald of Andraste, help us!_ The scream rose up around him, old and young, male and female, one voice that was everyone in Haven crying for him. And he had to weave around them, had to go through some of them, watch their forms explode as he did, and could only regret. But he had to save the living. He had to save those he could, and that number had been so few before, and now it was only one.

He ran for the stables, and as he watched, green-tinged flames burst through the thatched roof, a deep-throated roar of triumph that covered the screams of the horses. He couldn’t have taken any longer to reach the sable now as when he’d had to fight his way through the vanguard of Red Templars, but by the time he reached the stables, Drizzt was already coming out, ducking under the burning lintel, an arm braced around Master Dennet’s shoulders, the Horsemaster stooped and coughing with smoke, for a moment as real as both of them.

“Get to the Chantry,” Zak heard himself say, as he had done when this had been real, and just as before, his eyes weren’t for those who were alive, but those who’d been lost, or nearly. Dennet managed to keep from coughing long enough to nod, then turn away, and in a bare few steps, he’d faded into the fog and was gone.

Drizzt’s eyes sparkled in the light of the fires, fury twisting his mouth. “You really care for no one except yourself,” he spat.

Haven was burning around them, and for every one person he’d been able to save, five more had died: Zak’s temper finally snapped the leash he’d kept it on. “ _You know nothing about this place and less about me_ ,” he growled, and only after it was out of his mouth did he realize he’d spoken in Illythiiri, the mother-tongue of them both.

Drizzt recoiled as if he’d done what he half-wanted and slapped him. “And I hardly want to,” he snarled back, disdain dripping from his words, and the fact he’d answered in the Common tongue.

It was a blow, and one that would cut his legs out from him if it let it, and all the more that he’d suspected it for some time now. “Then when we leave here, you may have nothing else to do with me,” he said, and however cutting he wanted the words they were hollow, not nearly the good parry he had thought they should be. Because what it came down to was that all he’d been on Faerun, all he’d done, was for nothing.

Drizzt took a step forward, but whatever he was about to say, whatever demand he was about to make - that they needed to run into more burning buildings that weren’t there, that they were to fight the entire Red Templar army on their own, that he was not released because Drizzt had very human ideas of what made a family - something far worse got there first.

“ _Zaknafein_ ,” a voice as large as the Fade purred, coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once.

He didn’t know it was, not exactly. He didn’t have to. Just as Drizzt didn’t have to get along with him, didn’t have to _like_ him: as one, they turned and put their backs to each other, and Zaknafein’s eyes darted over the ruined path leading around Haven’s walls, feeling the heat from the stable on his cheek, and waited not for the Templar army, but something that hadn’t been here the first time and was far, far worse for that. He didn’t have to see them to know Drizzt’s were doing the same, that in this one thing they could agree - if only because he’d been Drizzt’s first teacher.

But when the voice continued, he knew it was only him who felt the fear turn his veins to ice, make his heart stop dead: “ _My brother the Nightmare told me of you. They send their regards and will see you soon, but I’ve been waiting for you to stand in front of me_.”

He felt Drizzt shift at his back, uncertain, unsteady; whether or not he heard the same words, he sensed something, knew something had gone very bad. Zak stole a glance at the stable out of the corner of his eye, and up to where the shadow of the Chantry loomed protectively over the village. It had saved them, more or less, once; if he were a demon, he’d twist that, use that expectation to cripple. “Who are you,” he murmured, because that question might have an answer, unlike such prosaic notions as _where_ the greater demon lord was.

The fog thickened, the green fading into only gray, and if he didn't still hear Haven screaming and Corypheus laughing, it would only be like one of the nights when he stood with Cullen on the walls. But he could. And even those nights, the wind shrieking over the glacier above Skyhold carried its own voices, from farther away. Against against his back, Drizzt trembled faintly, as if hearing his own death and dying on the wind. Zak stepped back, pressed his back against Drizzt’s before he could think better of it. There was nothing he could do to make this better, only prove that he was still here, and whatever he heard, he wasn’t alone.

“ _Do you not know me, Zaknafein?”_ the voice taunted, and he strained to pick out the truth in the voice: not Corypheus, that was a small mercy, and not the Nightmare, though something about it put him in the same mind as the Nightmare: resonant, androgynous, a taunting laugh rippling under the words. “ _After my brother leaves you, and you wake alone and stand alone with no one to share your burdens, no one to see how deeply you have failed, I am there, and I rejoice.”_

Demons were drawn to and fed on negative emotions: the Nightmare had grown powerful on fear of the Blight. This, though, this was full of the cold and bitter knowledge, the lingering memories. This was what came after fear, after the terror was passed and the survivors had to look and remember. And regret.

Cole had thought the Nightmare had begun as a spirit, seeking to help by taking fear away, and maybe this demon was the same. But that didn’t change the fact that he was sweating and shivering from its voice, from the realization that it would make him run through Haven, saving no one, and laugh, and grow stronger. Because this was not a demon of Fear, but Despair.

“Grief,” he said, the name flat on his tongue.

The demon laughed again, the world shuddering; the flames of Haven didn’t die, but they faded into shadows and smoke, not nearly so important now. But he could still smell the reek of burning flesh and hair; maybe that was the scent of Grief, far more than salt tears. “ _I’ve waited for you to come to me. And,”_ there was a different note in the demon’s voice, one that was all the worse for the fact that it was surprised, and drifting closer, “ _you’ve brought me another tasty morsel.”_

“Leave him,” Zak snarled, desperation yanking the words from his mouth. At his back, Drizzt stiffened, but he refused to take the words back. Even if it meant he was playing directly into the demon’s hands, giving it more power - but damnit, _not his son_.

The fog closed around them, thicker and darker and still full of the stench of fiery death, and now he just couldn’t see where anything was coming from; the Anchor ached all the way up his arm, hissing as if in its own protest. “ _Leave him?_ ” the demon mocked. “ _Oh, I would assuredly be glad to, but he is simply tangled in despair - and he doesn’t even know it.”_ Green drifted through the fog, swirling like a smile around them. “ _It will be a pleasure to make him see_. Really,” Grief continued, and this time the voice was too-real, grounded in something instead of roaming free and formless across the Fade; it wasn’t any better. Not when the voice was also familiar, and had cold running up his spine. “You should thank me for it.”

The fog parted, and Seggrit walked out, the eerie green light glinting off his gold hair, tarnishing it, and Zak’s throat tightened. The Nightmare had been a jade spider the size of Arch-Tinilith, shrouded in shadows and power, each of its legs ending in the knife Malice had used to sacrifice his heart. But Grief wore a more common form, and yet one that still could stop his heart just as effectively: Seggrit was dead.

“No,” he managed, forcing out the word through a tight throat. No, he didn’t want his son to carry the grief that was on his own shoulders, though he had a dark suspicion that deep down, Drizzt already did. “No, I’m the one you want. I killed you. Take me.”

“What?” Drizzt asked, a sharp whisper.

“You’re clever enough to find a way out,” Zak murmured, turning his head enough to see at least the curve of his skull. “Either an eluvian or…”

Or the other option was finding a place where the Veil between Fade and Thedas was thin, and ripping through, the same way the Breach had done when the Conclave had been destroyed at the Temple of Sacred Ashes. Movement caught the corner of his eye, but as he was turning back, he could almost see the Chantry of Haven rising up as a great dark shadow through the fog. People had died there, too, as the battle had raged, but…

“No,” Drizzt said, shaking his head. “You killed that human?”

Of course that was what he was talking about, and Zak hadn’t the faintest idea why he felt disappointed, a little knife twisting through his gut, a wound that would fester and kill by inches. “It’s a demon, not a human,” he said. “But yes, the form he picked - that man is dead because of me.” He’d died when a burning house fell on him in Haven. At least, Zak dearly hoped he’d been killed by the falling timbers, and hadn’t lived long enough to burn to death instead, trapped from trying to rescue someone else: the skin thrift merchant had tried to help, when the world came crashing down in fire and blades, and they both had failed to save anyone.

Watching the exchange, the demon split Seggrit’s mouth into an ugly grin, one not just of avarice, but malice and glee. “But it’s not just me, is it?” he asked, brightness in his eyes. His voice turned soothing, turned into Mother Giselle no matter she wasn’t dead but he suspected the demon would have a knack for picking voices that raked across his ears and struck deeper than he liked. “So many people dead by your hand, and you don’t even find pleasure in it anymore. And you still haven’t lost all you can lose.”

Demons were cunning, even those of Rage capable of coming up with a plan that would lead to their benefit; The Nightmare demon had reached through the Fade to corrupt the Gray Wardens, so that the fear of the Blight would grow and feed it. He could not let him think overlong of what Grief wanted. “We need to move,” he murmured to Drizzt, eyes still on the demon smiling with Seggrit’s face. Undoubtedly he’d hear their plans; all they could do was act, and fight their way through.

Drizzt went rigid again, a low intake of breath, and Zak saw Grief’s head cock to the side, another smile on his mouth, eyes sparkling with the promise that yes, he had heard what amounted to a plan, and no, he would not make things nearly that easy on them, and he was more than happy to let them _know_ he knew because, as with drow, there was power in watching an opponent fear and struggle before moving luxuriously in for the kill.

He whirled, and hissed under his breath at the sight of Drizzt rigid with fear and longing, staring into the fog; it slowly rolled back from a figure, and Zak pressed his eyes closed, unable to stop the despair that churned through him, and felt the demon’s rumbling amusement behind him. It had baited a snare well, with the impossibly-solid figure of Cattie-brie, walking out of the Fade, hands outstretched, red hair swirled over her shoulders, and the hem of her gown stained with blood up to her knees. “ _Beloved_ ,” she said, reaching for Drizzt.

And he, the fool, burst out, “ _Cattie_ ,” and ran for her. As she retreated into the fog, Drizzt chasing after her until they were both swallowed up, Zak heard Grief start to laugh again. “I’m going to kill you,” he told the demon flatly.

“Would that you could, Zaknafein,” Grief said, cheerful the way neither Seggrit nor Mother Giselle had ever been. “But we both know you’ll never do that. Not you. Not when you simply cry out to my pets.”

Out of the fog at his side loomed two figures, and if these were just as familiar, at least there was less pain involved, strictly speaking. The lesser Despair demons were tall and lanky, black robes and black hoods not hiding the long claws or the lip-less mouth that took up half their nearly-human face. They couldn’t speak, could only hiss like serpents, and he’d never gotten a good answer as if they actually had eyes or if they tracked their prey from emotions alone.

But unlike Grief, _they_ could be killed.

Just not without weapons, and right now, he didn’t count the Anchor as one, not when a plan was already swirling in the back of his mind that would demand every ounce of power he could wring from it.

The two Despair demons fanned out from Grief’s side, casting a wide circle, flanking him, cautiously drifting back and forth, blue light rippling along the hems of their robes. He couldn’t keep both of them in sight at once, and didn’t try; they wouldn’t attack while he was watching them, which meant…

The Anchor alerted him, a spike of pain in his hand. He dove to the right, tumbling over his shoulder, and felt the cold blast of air from an entirely-too solid block of ice rush passed him, filling the space he had just left. The Despair demon howled at being denied its prey, and he rolled again, and its second blast of ice rushed past him. “Annoying, it’s it?” he muttered, and still wished for Varric and Sera to keep up the irreverent chatter when he had to focus on the two enemies.

And pepper them both with arrows and possibly Sera’s improbable jars full of angry bees. Right now even if he’d had a weapon, they were content to drift well outside his reach even if he’d a mind to throw something at them. Right up until, almost casually, one of them shot forward, faster than it had a right to be, easily the equal of an arrow. No good way to avoid it, not without being herded somewhere he didn’t want to go, and Zak accepted the raking slash from its claws over his right arm, only just managing to turn the strike into a glancing blow.

He stumbled from the momentum even as he tried to swipe out at it, little more than an open hand slapping at it, but that was enough. Enough it hissed and leapt back from him, that rush of cold air on his face that was almost as bad as mocking laughter when it meant running through snow after it only to have it leap away again. But not this time.

He knew Haven almost as well as he knew Skyhold, and he had walked it in his dreams far more times. Grief had known that, wanted for him to suffer to see it burn again, but Grief hadn’t thought through what it meant that he _knew_ this place, knew it like he knew his own body.

And a warrior’s first weapon was always his own body.

He turned and ran through the gates that were askew and on fire, but open enough to let him worm through, if he didn’t think he’d be burned by them because he hadn’t been last time. Behind him, the shrieks of the Despair demons rose up, but terribly, their master Grief was silent, and that boded.

He didn’t stop. Couldn’t. Not even when something small and crawling darted out from the overturned table where Seggrit had sold his wares; he let the Fearling chase him, because to turn and kick it to death would give the Despair demons time to leap over the wall and pounce on him. It’s scrambling claws on the rock were familiar, and instead of fear, all he felt was a grim sort of inevitability.

Up the stairs, passing the collapsed tents where Varric had once held court around his fire, passed Adan’s apothecary where he’d woken after closing the first Breach, passed the training yards where he and Cullen had looked at their first crop of recruits and shared long looks full of resignation over their skill but also held that first kindling of hope that perhaps this Inquisition would not fail.

It hadn’t. He hadn’t. Because next to the training yards - and he vaulted over the fences to take the fastest path there - was a small, ramshackle building, little more than an outbuilding used for food storage or leather tanning. At least, it likely had been, until the Inquisition needed to requisition what had been inside, and Cullen got his hands on it. A breathy sort of laugh burst from his lips, and he yanked open the door of Haven’s armory, kicking it shut behind him. The Fearling scrabbled at the wood of the door, and he surveyed the offerings.

Such that there were. They’d crammed racks along the walls, and crammed in as many spears as they could, so many that when a squad came in to collect their weapons, the first one removed caused all the others to scatter and the soldiers scramble to collect their weapons. They’d hammered nails in the walls to hang the bows, and let the scouts and hunters squabble over who had taken who’s favorite bow. And they’d all be utterly relieved when they’d reached Skyhold, and the armory was easily three times the size and had been built for that purpose.

But he wasn’t in Skyhold, and he would take what Haven could offer. He reached for one of the bows, fingers trailing over the smooth yew shaft--

\--And then plunged through it as the bow faded into nothingness, vanishing before he could even properly get his hand around it. Because, Zak figured bitterly, why in the world would the Grief demon let him take up a weapon when it could let him hope and then take it away? It was the same tactics a drow matron would have used, and that was a different lingering stain of grief, that however much had changed in his life, that hadn’t, and likely never would.

 _Focus_. Giving into what roiled under his heart and sickened his belly would strengthen the demons currently clawing at the door - never mind they could have destroyed it with a gesture or walked straight through it, they hoped to stretch out the kill, because it wasn’t death they fed on.

And that was their mistake. He bared his teeth in what might be termed a grin, and reached for a spear.

They vanished under his touch too, of course. All but one, and and when he lifted it, the sharp tip faded into the shaft, the wood darkening even as he ran his hands over it. Not a spear, but a quarterstaff, like one of the ones he and Cullen had used to train the new recruits. But when he closed his eyes and weighed it in his hand, feeling the balance point, he knew that this one hadn’t come from the woods around Haven; it was too heavy, weighted towards the tip, the wood - or wood-like material - smoothed by many hands using it over countless years.

A training sword from Melee-Magthere. One he’d used when he’d been in charge of breaking drow boys into soldiers - though few of them needed any encouragement to indulge in a vicious nature, only honing in technique. It too had made him bitter and unhappy, hating himself and the world around him.

But it had also made him furious. And he’d always used anger to purge any hesitation, any unbalanced emotions. Any grief at what he did, where he was.

He spun, strode to the door; he flung it open and brought the quarterstaff cracking down on the Fearling before it realized the door was open. It shrieked, cringing down from the blow, but he knew it wasn’t so much the physical weapon that had wounded it, but that there was no fear for it to feed off of. It scrambled back, trying to retreat, but he struck again, slashing at its legs.

It crumpled up along its left side, and he stepped in and reversed the makeshift weapon, dropping the point. He stepped on the Fearling to hold it in place, and stabbed down with the tip, putting his weight and strength into the blow. Something that might have been ichor and might have been the _idea_ of ichor spurted up, and he kept stabbing until the Fearling’s pulp started dissolving into the ground of the Fade.

Only then did he look up, and snarl at the two Despair demons flanking the training ground, “I don’t have all day.” He took a step forward, and they drifted back, lingering well out of his reach, but also hesitating to come within it. It seemed _defiance_ was one excellent weapon against despair; he’d known that in the Underdark, but he’d spent so long on Thedas not needing it that the knowledge had become tarnished, and he’d once thought it a blessing. Not really - or not now, anyways.

But without fear, without despair clouding his heart, there was nothing for the demons to use against him, and nothing for them to be attracted to. He vaulted over the fence, into the training ground, and when they darted farther back, dropped his guard and bolted out of the training ground, towards the little hill the Chantry sat on. His heart hammered in his chest, breath rasping, but he could still hear the howls from the Despair demons, outrage at being tricked, and his mind calculated how far they were from him.

Far enough, he hoped, and, gaining the crest of the hill, darted around the back of what had been Leliana’s tent. It wasn’t on fire, he told himself, not really. There was smoke drifting up from it, and green flames licking at the canvas, but if the fire was real it would have consumed the fabric down to nothing by now. It was like in a nightmare, the world obeying what _seemed_ or _should_ be, rather than what was truly possible - but then, nightmares came from the Fade, didn’t they?

What mattered was that the memory of Leliana’s tent hid him from the sight of the path leading to the Chantry on all sides, especially as the Despair demons’ cries cut the air again, and he hunkered down near the guy-lines, watching breathlessly. What kind of eyes _did_ they have under those tattered hoods? Did they see at all, or did they really only track by emotions? Right now his were surging, heart hammering in his ears, hope and fear and mostly iron determination that he prayed smothered the other two with his control: he’d always felt what he liked, just took a care in what he showed to the world.

Snuffling, the little noises of fabric dragged over the ground, and they seemed so very loud right now. He shifted his grip on the weapon he’d been given, just in case; this was not the perfect battleground, but it would make them need to come at him one at a time, tangle them in the ropes and the canvas.

Maybe that layer of calculation covered his tracks just as much as brushing out footprints in the dirt. Or maybe they really did have eyes, but poor ones and couldn’t see well enough to hunt. Maybe like hunting dogs, they didn’t really think, not tactically, and had to return to their master for new orders. But after another breathless minute listening to them consider, almost confer, the next thing he heard was the steady swish of their robes retreating, back the way they’d come.

Zak waited another minute; demons were more than capable of subterfuge and ambushes. But that didn’t change the fact that he had to move, had to find Drizzt. Because, he thought as he looked up at the Chantry, soaring up so high above his head he couldn’t see all of it, he thought he just might be able to get them out of here, out of the Fade.

Because this was Haven on the night Corypheus attacked. And while so many of his people had been killed, they’d also been saved.

And the opposite of Grief was _hope_.


	4. Now: The Fade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter that earned the "Graphic Depiction of Violence" rating. And made me go "...that got dark" after writing it. Proceed with caution if you find violent depictions of killing someone with knives triggering.

Stepping out from behind Leliana’s tent, Zak cast one last glance up at the Chantry, then trotted down the other side of the hill, the back way towards the blacksmith and the tavern, ears pricked for the sounds of the Despair demons, moving as fast as he could silently manage. The fact that he couldn’t hear anything really didn’t help, not when it could mean so many things and few of them positive.

 _Go slow_. It was the last thing he wanted to do, something that made his skin twitch and his mind race with all the possible things he would be too late to stop, should he not hurry. But the old weaponmaster mantra rolled through his mind: _slow is smooth and smooth is good and good is fast_. It was what they drummed into the heads of every student in Melee-Magthere, forcing them to stop trying to strike fast when doing so with sloppy form just got them killed faster. The same was true now; rushing into danger would lead the demons to him, one way or another, and then he’d be dead and could do nothing.

He rounded the corner of the blacksmith’s shop, glancing in reflexively; it wasn’t on fire, because there were fewer things to burn inside it, but the roof was half-collapsed over the main forge. No movement; no bodies, either. He still ducked around the edge of the wall, crouching to keep out of sight in the open-sided building, and eased over to the weapon rack. No swords, but then, there wouldn’t have been on that night. There was, however, a knife: he reached out gingerly, picked it up, and it was heavy, cold iron, just as real as the training sword in his hand.

It was as good as he was going to get. He slipped it into the back of his belt, and scanned this corner of Haven.

The tavern was on fire, and when he closed his eyes against the light, he could hear screams from inside. It wasn’t real, he told himself: by this time, there could be no one was inside, or at least, no one who was still alive. He told himself that, and yet the screams went on and on, a woman’s high voice, a parody of the minstrel who had sung for them all in the evenings when the crackling of the fire didn’t make him flinch.

And he had saved her. Zak breathed out, pushed away the instinctive panic. He had run into that building before, like an idiot, and he had dragged her out just before the roof fell on them both. And the next time he’d heard her sing had been in that moment of utter despair, halfway up a mountain in the snow with Haven nothing but ashes behind them. All the bad memories from his life made it hard to hold onto the ones that didn’t turn out wrong. 

But right now, he had to believe he was going to save them both. “The dawn will come,” he murmured, and _that_ memory always kindled warmth and peace in him, all those voices raised to push back the sorrow.

 _Think_. The demon had lead Drizzt away: in theory they could be anywhere in the Fade by now, but his bones and gut said they weren’t, said they were still close, in this little corner ruled by Grief. What had the demon said: it had sensed so much grief in Drizzt, and wanted to pull it out so that he, too, grieved. It had lead him away; where in Haven would it have taken him? Where in Haven would Drizzt have gone without thinking, without knowing his surroundings?

Somewhere that seemed just familiar enough he wouldn’t have looked closely.

Apparently, his extended and enforced sojourn in Longsaddle was going to bear some useful fruit after all.

Zak picked his way through the smithy, slipped around the back corner and tried very hard not to feel the heat of the fire on his skin as he passed behind the tavern; the screams had stopped, either because the people were dead or because they weren’t hurting him any longer, all his attention focused beyond and none on them to grieve. There was no good way to sneak through the center of Haven - he’d tried, many times, long ago - but he did what he could, keeping to the shadows of the little ridge that separated the town into two parts, using the destroyed tents as a laughable amount of cover between him and the main gates.

There was nothing for it but a short sprint across the path to the shadows of Adan’s cottage, the overgrown herb garden catching at his trousers, even the elfroot spiked with thorns in this place. But Adan’s cottage backed up directly against the forest, the main wall not extending this far around the village.

And a little ways into the forest was an old logger’s cabin.

The trees here weren’t as old as the Emerald Graves, not when the village had cheerfully used the largest for their homes and the wall. But there as he walked under their branches, he almost sensed something similar, a weight and a sorrow to this place. This was the Fade, and the fact that the leaves faintly glowed and the shadows were faintly deeper under their reach had more to do with the green-gray streaks of the Fade beyond this chunk of land.

And even knowing that, knew this was the Fade and not real, knowing that every moment counted, he couldn’t help the long, slow breath as the green shadows covered him; this place had been the first place he’d felt comfortable in Haven, and he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it. Skyhold’s mountains and icy river was one thing, but this had been the place he’d retreated when the title _Herald_ weighed on him too much, when he’d been far less certain of his place and skill, and he’d wished he’d been able to come back when the title _Inquisitor_ did the same.

Even before, there wasn’t much of a path through the forest; most of the villagers who’d gone into the forest had their own favored patches of wild elfroot and embrium, and by communal agreement, never took too much from any one patch, and the hunters like him followed game trails without making their own. But he could have walked through these woods to the distant cabin blindfolded, which was just as well.

He scanned the ground for game-traces now as he slipped around the first stand of close-growing aspens, checked for trails of blood or bruised leaves that would lead him in a different direction, if the demon had lead Drizzt somewhere else instead. Nothing, except for plants that were blurry around the edges, only half-remembered and half-dreamed.

And a patch of Felandaris that hadn’t been growing on that side of the hill before; he’d only found the spine-covered, leafless twisted shrub in places were so much blood had been spilled the Veil had thinned.

And that told him something different than the trail he’d been searching for. He marked its location, the fact that it even existed, and pressed deeper into the forest.

Too quiet. His senses honed with each step he took that lacked the flutter and chirp of birds above him, the scramble of squirrels along the branches and the rustle of rabbits in the underbrush below. 

Too dangerous. Somewhere in here, a predator lurked, and this time, it wasn’t him. He tightened his grip on the training sword, and stalked around the landmark boulder, fixing his eyes on the cabin now in sight.

No light from the windows, no fire curling up from the chimney. And when demons were involved, that meant nothing. No movement, either, as he waited and watched for several racing heartbeats. That also might well mean nothing.

“Only way forward is through,” Zak murmured, and started a slow circle to bring him around the side of the cabin, skirting its own overgrown garden; unlike the thorny elfroot in Adan’s, this one had a vine that appeared to be sprouting withered apples, and he half-wanted to tell the spirit that had formed it that if it buried them they could be potatoes.

But then the front door in sight, and he slowed, senses quivering; it was ajar, and on the door frame was a smear of blood, bright red against the misty gray of the weathered wood. He stared at it for a long, long minute, for one moment unable to look away, unable to even think of what it meant, because a smear of real blood in the Fade meant so many terrible things. Then the rest of his mind caught up with him, and he studied it for a moment more before shifting his grip on the makeshift weapon, and striding across the cleared ground to push the door fully open.

A dead body stretched out across the floor before the hearth, a pool of blood flowing in one direction and a halo of copper-red hair in the other, a delicate white hand stretched out obscuring the face he knew without needing to see it. None of the blood stained her blue gown, Zak noted, that instinctive kick of horror cooling, strengthening the other suspicions that whispered just behind his heart.

“Father.” He looked up, casually shifted the training sword to his left hand has Drizzt stepped forward from the shadow corner of the cabin, bloody hands held up. “She was a demon,” he said, following Zak’s gaze to Cattie-brie’s body. “I…” his hand shook as he lifted it to his hair, left a streak of blood in the white as he pushed it out of his eyes. “I had no choice.”

Zak nodded, and studied Drizzt’s glazed purple eyes. Shocky - perhaps. “They show you your worst fears,” he said, his voice level in spite of what thundered behind his eyes. “You managed without a weapon?” he asked, and managed to make the question lift at the end, as if a hint of admiration.

“I…yes,” he said. He looked away, towards the body, and he shivered. “She was my love.”

“She was a demon,” Zak said, the words flat on his tongue. The sharp tone, if not the words, caught his attention, and when Drizzt looked over at him, he lifted the practice weapon, showing it. “This is better than nothing,” he said, and lightly tossed it across the room.

Drizzt fumbled, lunging off-balance to catch it with his right hand. He studied it, and by the time he looked up with more lies on his tongue, Zak was across the room after it, knife in hand. He met those purple eyes as he caught the collar of its shirt, and fury surged forward, drowned the little tug that might have made him hesitate. He plunged the knife down into its chest, where its heart would be.

“How?” the demon hissed as it staggered back a step, a snarl of rage and pain twisting the features of his son, though the sight of the hate burning in those eyes only made him tired because it was familiar.

He’d grieve over it later. Zak didn’t give the demon - Grief itself? Or only one of its hounds? - an answer, just stepped forward, scooped up his dropped weapon, and used it to sweep the demon’s borrowed legs out from under it; it had Drizzt’s form but not an ounce of his skill, not when it had crafted this ambush to get him to lower his guard.

He dropped down onto it, felt nails scramble against his jerkin, and slapped at them with the hard wood of the sword, used the length of it to pin them with one hand, even as he shifted his weight and used a knee to hold the demon in place. He dragged the iron knife out of its chest, drove it in again. It wasn’t ichor that splattered his face, but blood, bright copper on his tongue, and he struck again, and again.

There was no heart to cut out; the demon just thrashed and screamed under him, spreading blood making his hands slick as it fought like a dying spider. Zak shifted his grip on the knife, and opened up its throat with one slash.

Even a demon couldn’t survive that. The body shuddered one last time, then went still; unlike the Fearling, the body remained in the last shape it had chosen. It was probably meant to.

Zak heaved for breath as he pushed himself up from the body, and trying very, very hard not to look at it as the body of his son. That was what this place wanted. But no matter he knew it was a demon, he looked down and saw those wide lavender eyes, glazed with death now, staring up accusingly at him, a hole gaping in his chest, full of blood and empty of a heart. And far, far too much like one particular nightmare.

“Well. Not going to sleep for a week. Again,” he muttered, and it was his turn to lift a shaking hand to his face and scrub at the blood he could taste on his lips. All it did was fill his mouth with copper and iron, and the faintest hint of leather that came from Drizzt.

He closed his eyes, swallowed it down as best as he could, and left the knife there as he turned and walked out of the cabin, as if the air would be fresher five feet away when this was the Fade and the scent would follow him. He wasn’t in there, Zak told himself. The dead demon who’d formed the shape of Cattie-brie was, though; if it hadn’t actually been dead, it would have surged up to help the one he’d faced when he’d pinned it.

He thought of how steady he was on his feet just now, thought of this part of the woods, and lurched a step forward, towards the other side of the cabin.

A little passed the cabin, he could walk that far. There was a little stream that ran along the base of a hill, shielded from sight by a tangle of blackcap bushes. He brushed his hand over them, somehow hoping the leaves would clean the blood from his hands. The thorns scratched him instead, the pain too fleeting to ground him.

The sight of Drizzt sitting on the woodcutter’s stump did that. Zak had to stand and stare at him a long minute, the wooden practice sword dipping down to press against the ground - that same habit he’d tried to beat out of students of using their weapon as a walking-stick, but right now he needed something to keep him standing upright.

Drizzt’s arms were slumped onto his knees, gaze fixed on the pretty little stream that ran at his feet, and blood still dripped from his fingertips, lips parted and harsh panting just barely audible. But even when he finally looked over, startled to see him before his eyes narrowed in anger and suspicion, at least he wasn’t laying dead at his feet.

“How do I know you’re Zaknafein?” he demanded, pushing himself up from the stump, as unsteady on his feet as Zak felt.

It was a fair question, and right now it couldn’t even bite. “You probably saw that demons are mimics,” he said, taking a careful step forward. “But that they don’t know everything.” He waited until he got a jerky nod from Drizzt, confirmation enough that the other demon in the cabin was dead by his hand. “So I’ll tell you that I was dead for ten years before Malice brought me back to hunt you.” He didn’t remember much from that time, and given that his nightmares were crowded enough as they were, it was probably for the best, but he had worked out the rough timeline.

Drizzt’s eyes were still wary, and so he closed his eyes and sorted through the hazy images he’d had of that time, of his body being animated and some of his mind there to use his skill, his sense of tactics, while the rest of him was cut off from himself. But some moments were clearer than others. “Right before we fought over the acid pit, I killed a hook horror,” he said, opening his eyes. “And it turned into a pech.”

Drizzt’s shoulders slumped, and he nodded, looking away as he swallowed hard, blinking hard, but not bothering to wipe away the track of tears on his face. “I’d almost forgotten that,” he said, soft and rough. He drew in a deep breath, though his eyes remained fixed on the stream. “The water doesn’t wash the blood away,” he said, and for a moment he sounded almost like he had in the training gym of House Do’Urden, very young and sometimes swallowed up by the world.

Every instinct in him wanted to go to him, go to his son, and draw him close, offer his own strength for comfort, tell him that he _knew_ what it was to have blood on your hands that you regretted with every beat of your heart and you had to learn to live with it smearing the world around you whenever you touched something. But that would never be accepted, he knew that now. “No,” was all he said, quietly, and couldn’t keep the ache out of his voice.

Drizzt nodded, as if that had been the answer he’d been expecting, or as if he’d actually heard everything Zak hadn’t said. “We’re trapped here,” he said flatly, and finally looked away from the stream with eyes that were hard and resigned in a face flecked and smeared with blood.

Zak couldn’t quite manage a smile, but did shake his head. “No, we’re not,” he said with more confidence than he really felt, because he was only _fairly_ sure this would work. But what was the alternative? Stay trapped in the Fade, even if they could fight their way free of this particular set of demons? He met Drizzt’s eyes, and knew that if this didn’t work, he would make sure their deaths were swift and painless. “Follow me. If the demons separate us again,” he added, “head to the Chantry - the largest building in the village, on the hill.”

“The temple?” Drizzt asked, and as he spoke, seemed steadier: not better, just putting everything that had happened aside, because he’d been given a goal to achieve and a way to do so.

Zak shrugged, because he wasn’t altogether wrong in the term and he didn’t think now was the best time to explain the difference. “If you like. If you get there before me, hunker down by the statue of Andraste up front - where the altar would be,” he explained. “Wait for me as long as you think prudent.” And he would try very, very hard not to tangle with another demon, not to be killed.

But better still would be to not get separated. He beckoned, and turned back towards the village. He couldn’t look back, but there was a little rustle, and more, a simple _presence_ at his shoulder, and he knew his son was just behind him, picking his way across the forest floor with a light deftness that was almost inaudible.

It was the _almost_ part he paid attention to, listening for the faintest of rustles of a foot brushed through fallen leaves, a softer grinding of a step onto a tumble of pebbles, for the quiet rasp of a breath, not quite panting in an out but not silent and steady as a hunter should be.

At least he could walk, wasn’t hampered by a wounded leg. But there were all kinds of other wounds to worry about, and maybe he himself was listening just a little too closely to the sounds of him behind him, his attention at his back instead of in front of him. After all, he knew the quickest way back to Haven, from the general direction to the place where if they stepped from one fallen log to another they could save the few steps and seconds that it would take to circle them, and every step and second counted now.

They were just drawing to the edges of the village, his mouth opening with his next instructions, when all his plans fell apart at his feet. “ _Zaknafein_ ,” Grief said, once more coming from everywhere in the Fade and entirely too amused, and he froze in his steps like a rabbit before a hound. “ _I love when you try the most direct solution. It means someone dies, and you come to regret it_.”

Drizzt stiffened at his back, and he really had to wonder why the boy was surprised, much less why he trusted the words of something that was trying to kill them. Instead, he glanced towards the village of Haven - still burning, but now the buildings just seemed crowned with lights, the fire rippling translucently up from their roofs. Not far, now, but then they would have a hard sprint up to the second level but the Chantry door should be open, as it had been on the night of the attack. And from there…

…He’d never seen where the refugees had gone. His heart skipped a beat as he looked over the ruined Haven, and that memory seemed to play in front of his eyes: the scent of iron and copper from so many wounded, moaning or too-silent around them, echoing in the vastness of the Chantry, even over the booms as Corypheus pressed the attack; Cullen, blood on his mantle, amber eyes frantic as he tried to hold himself in check; Josephine frantic; the serene will of Roderick; the strange boy Cole hovering at the edges of their conference. He’d been a part of crafting the plan, but they’d needed a distraction, and he had been the best bait they’d had for Corypheus.

How hidden could it possibly be? He shoved the fear aside, lifted his chin and addressed Grief. “Try and stop us again and you’ll be the one with regrets, demon or no.”

The world trembled as Grief laughed, almost giddy. “ _Why would I stop you? If you’re stopped, you stop suffering,_ ” it said, and for a moment, it sounded exactly like a drow. “ _No, I hope you both live long, long lives, and visit often in your dreams.”_

It wasn’t exactly a comforting benediction, but Zak took a step forward, listening hard for anything else moving around them, in the forest or in Haven. Whatever they were suffering and grieving now, there was the cold logic of drow in letting them go so they could please Grief still more. But he’d never yet trusted what another drow said was only logical.

Nothing. He took a step, and sensed that he’d moved forward on his own, sensed the chasm opening at his back. Again. He glanced over his shoulder, cocked an eyebrow at Drizzt’s wide eyes and stricken expression as they met his. “Given how much blood’s on your hands, are you going to take the high ground now?” he demanded. “Or are you going to follow me?”

It was a cold, cruel blow, and he’d meant it to be, pain bright as a slap. Drizzt’s eyes brightened with fury, but at least he lost that horrified look and took a step forward, then deliberately checked shoulders against him as he took point, striding for the village. “You said, to the temple,” he said, flat and cold. “Then let’s keep moving.”

Zak nodded, and raised his free hand to his shoulder as he fell into step in Drizzt’s wake; the ache in his shoulder from the bump was already fading, but the one that rippled under it would linger. He refused to regret, as such, not when it would keep them alive, not when he knew that this time he deserved it, but it still ached under his skin.

It was just as well he was the one following; when they slipped around the side of Adan’s cabin, and he froze in shock, fear wracking through his shoulders no matter what he’d told himself. Huddled into a mass in the lower level were all the dead of Haven: innocent civilians who hadn’t been fast enough to get to the Chantry with gaping wounds across their backs, Inquisition soldiers gutted and torn and beheaded, and even Red Templars with bodies already twisted by the glowing Red Lyrium a little more broken from the battles.

And at their head, Seggrit grinned, and in the green fog that moved behind his eyes, Zak saw Grief. “I didn’t say I’d make it easy for you,” he said, almost cheerfully.

“ _Run_ ,” Zak snarled, and to his credit, Drizzt took off without needing to be told twice. The horde of the dead - or Fearlings or other demons taking their shapes but still so many familiar faces - surged forward, and he couldn’t give them another look or thought, had to turn away and run, that dead sprint he’d thought they’d have to do but not like this. Not with the thunder of too-many feet behind them, and otherwise silence from the attacking army.

Not when the fastest of them, one of the soldiers he and Cullen had trained, caught up with them at the steps up to the crest of the hill. Zak twisted and brought the training weapon down on his reaching hand without mercy, without regret.

The blow broke the soldier’s wrists; he still pawed at Zak’s side. Zak cracked the weapon across his head, and when he staggered, kicked him the rest of the way down the stairs. He fell directly into a knot of the dead, tangled their unfamiliar bodies.

Zak didn’t turn his back on them as he lightly backed up the rest of the stairs, battered weapon still ready for when they sorted themselves out. Something tugged at his sleeve: he whirled, checked the blow just in time to keep from killing Drizzt.

To his credit, he didn’t flinch at the training sword lifted into his face. “Door’s open,” he said, and his voice was tight but his hands were sure.

Zak glanced up, and like a miracle from Blessed Andraste Herself, the doors _were_ open, the Chantry’s interior gaping dark ahead of them. He shoved Drizzt in that general direction to get him moving, and faster, and for once Drizzt didn’t even glance at him, just accepted it and ran flat out.

He didn’t have his son’s youth, and his breath was harsh and raw in his throat, but Zak had spent the last ten years a hunter for Clan Lavellan, and the last three running back and forth across Thedas and through various battles; he matched his son nearly stride for stride, and they burst into the open door together.

The Chantry smelled more of smoke than incense, too charred to be familiar, just a faint trace of old blood lingering along the floorboards. The long pews had been overturned and moved aside to make room for what had been a very temporary infirmary; Drizzt spun and set his back against the enormous doors, shoving them closed by inches, and Zak grabbed the leg of a nearby pew and hauled it, scraping noisily and unhappily, the few feet over to the door.

Doors closed, Drizzt glanced at the noise, saw what he was doing, and grabbed the other end. Between the two of them, they got it propped against the closed door. They were both panting, needed to step back and catch their breath more than study their handiwork. “For what good it will do,” Drizzt said caustically.

Zak lifted his shoulder in a shrug, giving him the point: they were demons, and were hardly going to be stopped by a few pieces of wood. Though, on the other hand he still held onto the wood practice weapon, and it had served him well enough when it could have vanished entirely at any point. It wasn’t worth arguing about. “Come on,” he said, gesturing up to the front of the Chantry. Drizzt followed, and Zak had to put him out of his mind, eyes flicking up and over the rustic Chantry.

He knew this Chantry because he’d woken up imprisoned in its basement; it meant certain features were scarred deep into his memory. The door to the left was the one that had lead to his prison, but that was a single short hallway, and though it lead down, it dead-ended in the cell he’d been held in. The door to the right was the way to the Revered Mother’s office, such that it was: there wasn’t even enough room for a bookcase inside, much less a secondary exit or a secret passage. On more than one dark night he’d prodded at the tapestries hanging from the rafters, down over the gray stone walls, a little defiance against the symbol of the Chantry worked onto them after the Chantry had disowned the Inquisition; he would have liked to imagine he’d have noticed if one concealed a secret passage sometime in there. Which left…

He lifted his eyes to the statue of Andraste as he approached; it was missing one of the arms that was usually extended in welcome, but though the wood was dark with soot, so dark it might have been a drow there, the expression was the same, sober and sad. Not a goddess one came to looking for power, but maybe for sanctuary, and maybe for an impossible victory.

“Where is it,” he murmured as he circled the statue, heart still hammering in his chest, and worse when there was nothing. No delicate embossed carvings around the base that might be a secret lever for the passage, not even a seam along the floor that suggested where it might move. 

It had to be here. There was nowhere else it could be, and he _knew_ his people had been saved. “We _do not die here_ ,” he snarled up at Andraste’s impassive smile, and wasn’t quite sure if he meant _then_ or _now_.

“Herald,” a rough voice said, and he whirled, held up a hand to stay Drizzt’s instinctive rush forward. The man in front of them was almost as bloody as they were, but the blood that covered his belly was wet and nearly the same color as the robe itself, his face ashen, not even the starburst of the headdress glimmering, much less life in his eyes. “Use the Anchor here,” he said, gesturing up to the statue. “And you will be saved.”

The hairs on the nape of his neck prickled, and Zak flexed his left hand, energy crackling through the Anchor. “This wasn’t how this happened before, Roderick,” he said, taking a careful step forward.

High Chancellor Roderick Asignon had not been a kindly man; he’d taken every opportunity to undermine the fledgling Inquisition and had taken great pleasure in complaining while he did. But he’d gained those wounds saving someone in this battle, and died of them after leaving them all to safety. And just now, a gentle smile crossed his face - and white power flashed into his eyes. “I know,” he said gently. “But it’s good that things are different, sometimes. Use the Anchor,” he said encouragingly. “Open a rift. And with faith, _leap_.”

It could be a demon behind that lined face. But gazing into the power in the eyes, Zak didn’t think so. There was something else that stirred under his heart, not the suspicion and anger he’d felt when facing a Despair demon. Something he’d felt only once before, facing another entity in the Fade that he couldn’t quite identify.

Spirit of Roderick, Spirit of Hope, did it matter? Not anymore than it had mattered if it was Divine Justinia, or a Spirit of Faith taking her form.

Behind them, the door shuddered, trembling in its frame, and Zak nodded to Drizzt, passing him the makeshift, battered weapon, just in case. “Stand back,” he warned. “You better get out of here,” he added to what currently was Roderick.

It smiled again, and the blood vanished as its form started shimmering with brilliant white light. “Don’t worry so much, Herald,” it said, and this time it wasn’t Roderick’s voice, but something just as powerful as Grief’s had been, only quieter. “ _I cannot be killed, not even by you_.”

Good enough. The door shuddered, and Zak lifted his left hand, and focused on the Anchor. Wood splintered, and it didn’t matter. A Despair demon shrieked - Drizzt shouted - and it didn’t matter.

There was power that sizzled under his skin, twined through his veins, and if it hadn’t actually been Andrasate who’d reached out her hand and saved him from the Fade and given him the Anchor to close the Breach, if it had all been an accident he’d stumbled into a twisted ritual and this power should have been Corypheus’s, it didn’t matter. It was still _his_ to command. He’d made it a weapon, and had honed his skill with it as much as he had any other weapon that had come to his hand.

And he had spent _years_ closing Rifts. This was the same: just opposite.

The power flared up through his arm, and he closed his eyes, focusing on the timber of it, the weight and heat of it in his palm. Then he struck, the same way he would have swung a sword to cleave through a spidersilk cloak. Just like with a sword, he could feel the power leap forward, arcing through the air, its sharp edge an extension of his own thoughts; and like a spidersilk cloak, the Veil between Thedas and the Fade had weight and texture and presence.

It just really wasn’t supposed to be cut.

The air whined around him, climbing up in pitch, and pain lanced down from his palm, his arm heavy as if encased in one of Dagna’s lead gauntlets. But the power was still there, full and rich. He gritted his teeth as he stretched his hand farther, fingers splayed to cup the Anchor, and channeled more power through the arc of the Anchor and into a spot already glowing green in front of Andraste’s spread hands.

The Chantry trembled, but the spot grew no larger. The floor shuddered again, rolling under his feet, but that could be the demons breaking through.

He couldn’t think of that, couldn’t worry about anything but what was between his skin and the air.

He set his feet and raised his hand against the pain, and leaned his weight on the edges of the arching ribbon extending up from his hand. Pain spurted again, sharp as a knife blade through his palm, and he gritted his teeth as he pressed power and strength and _will_ against the Veil holding him from his home.

And with a blinding green flash, the Veil split open, a glorious green Rift twisting and dancing under Andraste’s serene smile.

Drizzt shouted, and if there were words in it his ringing ears couldn’t hear them. He shook himself free of the last tendrils of power, looked over, and snarled at the Despair demon swooping darting attacks towards his son. He was only barely fending it off with wide blows from the practice sword and some admittedly impressive footwork. One was bad enough, but at a glance he saw so many more pressing up against the gap in the door, a matching rift to the one he’d made.

Time to go. He timed it just right, waiting for the Despair demon to swoop away for another run. Then he grabbed Drizzt by the arm, gave him barely a tug in the right direction. And they were sprinting again, this time the short few steps it took to reach the Rift, and unlike the one he’d opened over that ruined castle, this time this was his first plan, and wherever they ended, it would be better than here.

He tightened his hand on Drizzt’s elbow, got a curt nod in return, and with the Despair demon crying in outrage behind them, together they leapt into the Rift — 


	5. Now: Mountains

— And fell into snow.

Even deep and softly mounded, snow only took the first edge off a fall; it was no magic spell to make the fall as soft as a feather drifting down. No matter it was deep enough they didn’t hit the ground directly, Zak still hit hard.

Pain and memory flared up his right arm as he sank deep into a drift, the wind driven out of him and wet cold wrapping around him. For a moment it was just uncomfortable, then it numbed pained skin and abused muscle, all those reminders that he had spent much of this day fighting. For a moment, he even thought he heard the snow sizzle as he pushed his still-glowing left hand through it, half to break the snow around him so he could struggle forward and half because the Anchor _hurt_ , not just the flickers of lightning-quick pain or the heavy aches, but a pain every bit sharp as when he’d broken his right arm.

And then the cold stopped being soothing and became its own sharp pain, needles stabbing into every inch of his skin, his fingers turned thick and unwieldy, numb in the most dangerous of ways.

Except for the Anchor. That still hurt all down his arm, fire against the ice.

And yet. He was alive. Zak dragged in a deep breath, coughed as the cold bit into his lungs, breath pluming out as a long stream of gray fog, and memory whispered another pain, not nearly old enough because it, too, had been a lingering gift of Haven. He swept another arc through the snow in front of him, pushed the memory aside, and tried to fight his way though the drift and to harder-packed snow.

“ _Zak.”_ His head whipped around at the sound of his name, his true name, pained and rasping, from Drizzt’s voice, and changed his path, fighting through deepening snow: Drizzt was only yards from him, but the drift he’d landed in was deeper, the snow up to his chest. He still fought to free himself, just as Zak fought to reach him, but feet of snow couldn’t be willed away or beaten down.

For a moment, it seemed both their efforts would be futile. His heart surged forward as he shoved his way another step closer, anger choking down the despair: he could almost reach out and touch him, almost offer a hand to yank him out of the depths of the drift, except when he did he was still feet away.

 _No._ Not like this. Not trapped in snow and cold. Not like it had been after Haven.

As if in blessing, his feet caught firmer ground, and with one last surge, he got himself onto what was probably a rock shelf when the snow melted, and right now meant that this side of the drift was waist-deep. Shallow enough that it was comparatively easier to wade the rest of the way to Drizzt, and he watched his son’s shoulders slump in relief, watched him stop fighting and gulp down breaths that rasped as much as his did.

This time when he reached down a hand in offering, Drizzt didn’t hesitate to take it; his hand was just as cold, and trembled with something far more than just the icy wind biting through soaked garments meant for a day in mid-autumn; his light purple eyes were glazed and bright.

Zak’s heart sank. The demon’s slashing claw - not his demons from the Fade, the ones back on Faerun - held poison, they’d known that, and it seemed that their time wandering in the Fade had done the injury no benefit.

His son still looked over their surroundings with more alertness than he had a right to show, even as he trembled, unsteady on his feet. Zak lifted his arm over his shoulders, took his weight against his side and hip. And tried not to grunt, tried very hard not to tremble with pain and exhaustion himself. He might only have the strength to walk forward under his own power, much less carry the two of them, but he damn well was going to try.

“This isn’t Icewind Dale,” Drizzt said at last, relief as much as confidence in his voice. It faded as he shook his head. “But it might be one of the passes of the Spine of the World, and I can’t be sure which.”

Zak looked over the mountain valley they’d been dumped in. “It’s a pass, to be sure,” he said. Two mountain peaks rose up to either side of them, a broad river of snow, unbroken but for their thrashing, flowed down from their feet towards the other side of the pass. On the horizon, he could make out a frozen river winding through a valley floor, more mountains beyond; he couldn’t quite see all the way down the pass, though, not with the spars of rock that jutted up from the snow as the ground started to slope downward.

They were at the top of the pass, then, or nearly. Good and bad; they wouldn’t need to climb any higher, but descents could be chancy, especially with the way the rocks reared up and made the path twist and narrow, and that particular direction might not lead them to safety.

And against all that snow and black rock, the Fade Rift glimmered shifting green, a color he was heartily sick of just now, sending ripples of color over the pristine snow and making the boulders dance between several fainter shadows.

“Hold on,” he said, shifting Drizzt against him so he could lift his left hand and spread his palm towards the Rift. And try not to look at the green lines that traced down his skin, definitely thicker than they had been yesterday, or when he’d left Skyhold a month ago to cross worlds to be with his son.

He’d done this a thousand times, in the middle of farmlands and lush forests where the Rift had been nearly hard to see against all the green, and snowy wastelands much like this one. He closed his eyes, promised himself that if he got home he’d plunge his hand into a whole vat of crushed elfroot, and reached for the power within him.

It moved like honey that had gone old, thickened in the jar, and as he pushed at it, proved that it had also formed hard little crystals that lumped together, held the power back, and dug into him.

Pain. Pain and cold that made him shiver, dragged his mind directly back to stumbling through the snow after Haven, one arm broken and the other in so much pain from using the Anchor in a way it likely shouldn’t have been, that it was as good as useless too. He’d survived that, he told himself, and pushed all of the physical pangs aside, and the sense of his son trembling under his arm. He dragged his wayward mind back from memory and told himself that there was no blood on his hands ( _though there should be_ his traitorous mind whispered). He ignored that he was still knee-deep in snow and the sun was closer to west than overhead and if they didn’t find shelter they’d die here anyways and they couldn’t do that if he didn’t close the damned Rift.

A ribbon of power arched up from him, and Zak gasped in relief as it struck the Rift. He marshalled his will and focused on the point of that light connecting to the seething, shifting surface of the Rift; he groped, reaching through the ribbon of power to push against its edges towards each other, collapse it down and fill the place that had been opened. It responded as sluggishly as an ice-choked river, but it did move, the edges griding towards each other.

Too late.

A pulse up his arm, jarring attention and power, not quite enough to break the connection, barely enough for him to notice. Just the Rift protesting what he was doing. A little white light flashed. Against the snow, with the shifting green light of the Fade Rift, it was almost impossible to see; he only caught it as movement, eyes flicking to it. He could not focus on it, not with the pain of the Anchor to fight through, and dismissed it as a gust of wind sending snow up into a spiral.

A blast of ice crashed into him, covered his chest, sent him staggering to the side, the Anchor snapping fire down his arm as he lost the connection; Drizzt shouted, grabbed at him, but he didn’t have the strength to hold them upright. They both went down into the snow, the shorter fall no less painful than the one down from the Rift.

The Fade Rift surged brighter and bloomed, flaring with the pain, sending out arching roots to the ground across the valley floor, surging a moment before vanishing. And even hearing the power hiss and crackle above him, Zak still caught the unmistakable giggle as the light darted away, spiraling up through the air before launching another arc of ice their way, nearly an afterthought.

He couldn’t walk, could do nothing to avoid it. He closed his eyes, braced himself for pain. It didn’t come, but Drizzt gasped, low and deep, before crashing back into him, a moment of weight and pain before rolling to the side.

He opened his eyes and lunged before he really saw what happened, needing to close the distance to where Drizzt had fallen deeper into the snow. He was trembling visibly, one hand beating at the white magic covered his chest, the other groping at his side for the hilt of one of his swords. They both knew he was at the wrong angle to draw it, and so did the wraith.

Another ripple of white light cut through the air, connecting him with the almost-invisible foe. The magical assault didn’t last long. Just too long.

It broke off, and he just caught the movement of the creature again, white against the gray sky, as it zipped behind the Fade Rift, and Zak tracked its movement grimly. They weren’t powerful: it would need to gather strength after two magical attacks so close together. That would give them a reprieve; not a long one, but long enough.

Zak fought his way through the snow, heaving for breath under a shirt that had become a sheet of ice under the blast of magic. He got a hand to Drizzt, pulled him upright from the snow, and shifted to try and take his weight again. 

Drizzt shrugged him away, stepped to the side, but this time seemed less from taking offense, and more to give himself room to fight; his head was up, eyes tracking the wraith. Though how he was still upright, Zak didn’t know. Maybe it was just that the snow wouldn’t let him fall all the way down. And that one glance was all Zak needed to see that he had a dangerous sheen of palest gray coating the tips of his ears and fingers: the sure sign of frostbite even among their kind.

Catching Zak’s eyes, Drizzt said dryly, “I’m used to it.” Given his former home had been Icewind Dale, Zak was inclined to believe him. It just didn’t make his shrug any less a shudder of cold. But he was probably right to ignore it: the wraith would kill them quicker than the cold. “Another of your demons?” he asked, not taking his eyes from where he was tracking the light darting in and out of the shadow of the Fade Rift.

“Wraith,” he said shortly. Zak’s eyes were on the Rift itself, the way its edges pulsed and expanded, the lazy arcs that lifted up from its surface and grounded themselves in the snow. That was the worrying part of this: the Fade looked as though it was quite happy to expand still more, and if he had seen far too many wraiths in his time here, he knew there were worse things that could drop from the Rift. Still, he added, “This sort, consider them a handmaiden to a Despair demon.” 

For a small miracle, Drizzt didn’t protest, didn’t argue, just nodded, eyes narrowing, and it might have been as if he wasn’t poisoned, wounded, exhausted, and frostbitten. He drew a sword, and stood a little straighter, firm enough on his leg that Zak thought he would dance over the snow regardless of the wound. “We need cover,” he said, and turned to stare down the long slope of the pass, towards the valley floor. “Can you get to the first boulder?” he asked.

Zak glanced from the Rift to the boulder and back, estimating the distance, and how deep the snow was between here and there. It would be cover, and give them plenty of distance from the wraith’s attacks. It would also just put him at the very edge of his ability to use the Anchor on the Rift. And if he didn’t close it, it was just going to spew out more demons, and more dangerous than one little wraith.

One little wraith that would gleefully kill them both if they stayed here.

“Yes,” he said, and struggled to get his feet under him and onto something like solid ground again. Drizzt steadied him - or swayed into his side and it amounted to steadying him, their weight and wounds balanced between the two of them. 

With a glance between them, they started running, best they could. They were wading as much as running, each step sinking deep before finding purchase either on hidden rock or hard packed snow; each step forward dragging through the snow, so much more work than a flat run through an open field. Within a few steps he was heaving for breath, in and out through parted lips, tasting blood from where the cold air had already made them crack. _Altitude_ , he knew, knew well the dangerously thin air up in the mountains. 

Altitude and cold and how much they had fought today. And they had to fight just a little more, he told himself - just a little longer.

But they had no time. He’d used it to their advantage on Faerun, planned for just this - but as he’d told Drizzt, this was Thedas, and the Rift worked against him here.

It wasn’t the cold that shivered down his spine, but a cry of triumph, shrieking like the sharpest of mountain winds. No matter the danger, no matter they needed to keep moving forward, he had to look back. Had to watch as the Despair demon shot out of the green Rift, swirling up and flying free and high up into the air, its tattered robes whipping around it.

Perhaps it was one of the same ones that been chasing them in the Fade, or perhaps it was one drawn to the energy of the Fade Rift, drawn to the crest of - yes, of _despair_ that welled up inside him at the sight of it.

But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t keep fighting.

He tried to time it, tried to hear the movements of the rippling robes over the sound of the wind, the sound of his thundering heart, his and Drizzt’s ragged breath. “Down,” he snarled, dragged Drizzt to his knees in the snow.

His son still cried out in pain, the sword flying out from his hand, flashing in the pale light as it fell into the snow. Too late he saw it wasn’t the Despair demon attacking, but the wraith; not striking at a distance but come up close, raking what passed for claws over his chest. Its momentum carried it forward, further down into the pass, but with it trailed something just as ghostly white as it’s form, up from Drizzt.

He coughed, and pushed himself up from all fours, but that was as far as he got, his eyes glassy again, trembling harder than even in the cold. _Energy_. They were creatures of the Fade, creatures of magic and spirit; he’d learned the hard way that their wounds didn’t drip blood, but still sapped strength. It was a foe they needed to kill quickly. 

The wraith darted forward again, but this time he was ready for it. Zak shoved out a surge of power from the Anchor: nothing of finesse, just what strength he had pushed through the Anchor. Not much, but enough to make the wraith veer off, give him just a little time as it got itself turned around and came back around. He grabbed Drizzt by the elbow, roughly shaking him. “Stand or we die,” he growled.

Drizzt looked up at him, for a moment expression terribly blank as if they had no idea who they were or what was happening. Then his fingers dug into Zak’s sleeve, and he struggled to stand, got his good leg back under him. But the one that the demons had Faerun had wounded wouldn’t carry his weight, not even with battle-energy; Zak felt him trembling against his side as he tried, as he fought to get that leg under him and to at least stand straight.

And he felt the moment defeat struck, made him suddenly heavier against Zak, deadweight that staggered him. “I—” Drizzt began, breathy and pained and more apologetic in one syllable than he’d been all through the last month.

The wraith struck again. No, not the wraith: _two_ wraiths. One hovered back, swooped in and struck when the first twisted away, and Drizzt cried out - not in pain but in sorrow - and convulsed against him. White light drifted out of his mouth, almost the same color as their breath, but even without being a mage he could feel the difference crawling against his skin.

Zak shouted, wordless outrage that fueled the second pulse he shoved out of the Anchor - so very heavy on his palm, pain pounding and pulsing all the way up past wrist and elbow and into his very shoulder. It made them scatter. But their mocking giggles were still too close and far too knowing. 

Bad. Worse was looking down and seeing that Drizzt was heavy against him because he was unconscious. Breathing. He could feel his breath, barely, in the movement of his chest, because he certainly couldn’t feel it against his skin.

And the world became very simple. He didn’t have the strength to carry him. Zak set his teeth, shifted his grip, hooking both hands around Drizzt’s chest, and glanced over his shoulder to get the direction towards the rock they’d marked. Not quite twenty yards, not even the distance of the first target on Skyhold’s archery range. Unburdened across flat ground, he could have covered it in seconds.

Backwards, eyes on the wraths, he dragged Drizzt the first step, and his limbs shook with the effort. Another step, and he’d rest, he told himself, lying as he took another, and then another. The wraiths paced him, annoyingly slow when they all knew they would swoop down the moment they regained their own strength. That was a luxury they could afford, because he could not.

Another step. His shoulders screamed with dragging the deadweight, and he compensated by thinking about the Anchor, the way it surged in time to the Fade Rift in the valley above them.

Another step. His foot skidded on whatever the snow had hidden, and he really did stop, settling his feet beneath him again, feeling back with his heel. Impossible to feel balanced, not backwards and through the snow, but he found a better place to set his foot, glanced over his shoulder to see just how far he’d come and how far he had to go —

And the Despair demon was a black mass in front of his eyes, all the warning he got. It struck his back with the force of a hunting eagle, ripping his hands from Drizzt. Long slashes of pain flared through across his shoulder as he went airborne, the world a tumble of white before he struck the snow.

Gasping for breath, Zak reached out to force himself back to his feet, tried to summon what remained of his reserves of strength. His hands trembled as he rested them against the surface of the snow, shoulders hotly painful as the Anchor, six long stripes just like the whips of the priestesses, so long ago and far away.

 _Despair_. It was their weapon, as much as the claws. But Zak looked up, saw the Despair demon halfway across the valley and swooping back around for another strike, and couldn’t fight it down.

Not when Drizzt was a dark lump in the snow beyond his reach, both wraiths hovering over him. They dipped into taunting little darts down that might have been strikes or might have just been malicious taunts of someone beyond seeing or feeling them - and so were a weapon aimed at him. Just as taking his son first had been to kindle these seeds in his belly.

Not that they’d needed to. He knew their situation entirely too well for anything but despair. They were alone on the side of a mountain, exhausted and wounded and lost, not a weapon or even a torch to their name. All his skill, all the battles he’d fought, and he couldn’t find a way out of this - not for him, and not for Drizzt.

This was how he was going to die: not giving his life for someone he loved, not a defiant gesture against someone he hated, not saving the world from a fate that would have left everyone dead, innocent and guilty alike. He was going to die on the side of a mountain at the hands of a pair of wraiths and a Despair demon who would take long enough to kill them they would regret every instant of their lives. And unchecked, the Fade Rift would grow until it was as large as the Breach, and swallowed the world.

The knowledge sat on his chest with the coldness of facts, the sort of despair that went so deep he could only be numb to it.

Except for the one spark of anger that always burned in him. Not enough to warm him, not enough to give him strength to stand up and keep fighting. Just enough to latch onto the last positive thing of his life: the sight of those burning eyes of the spirit, Roderick’s voice soothing and trusting, telling him exactly what he’d needed to hear to throw of strength into this gamble.

“You said we’d be saved!” he screamed to the spirit, the demon, whatever it had been. It was beyond hearing, beyond being able to be wounded, he knew that. But if throwing his rage towards it was futile, so was any other attack he might try now. “Liar,” he managed, voice rough with furious grief.

The spirit seemed to take exception to the term.

Sunk to his knees in the snow, even the Anchor barely flickering with the faintest of green glow, Zak felt the shadow of the Despair demon cross over him. He looked up, and demon’s slowly opened, displaying all those long teeth, sharp as daggers. Unable to flee or even fight to hold onto his life for a few minutes more, he only looked up into its monstrous mouth and felt phantom pain burning over his heart, the memory of _exactly_ what it would feel like when those claws plunged into his chest and those teeth snapped up his beating heart.

The demon drifted closer, a tauntingly slow advance.

And an arrow struck it clean in the back of the head: an excellent shot, the arrowhead protruding from out the open mouth.

It reared back, shrieking in pain and writhing to find what had struck it, and all of that was irrelevant, when Zak looked past the demon and saw a mounted shadow on the crest of the pass above them. It could have been an Avvar hunter or a bandit who raided this pass or even a very lost Dalish. It didn’t matter. Whoever it was blew a long, drawn out call from a hunting horn, sweet and clear, echoing across the mountain spars.And that sound sent a shudder down into his belly and bones, bright and familiar and full of hope.

And as the demon flailed and twisted around and revealed the back of the arrow, he couldn’t stop staring: the fletching were gray feathers neatly bound above the nock and below the feather with red twine. Ordinary gray goose feathers, found across the length and breadth of Thedas, marked with a hint of brightness so that she would be able to tell them apart from everyone else’s when the scouts had an archery contest behind Herald’s Rest in the upper bailey.

“ _Inquisitor!_ ” Lieutenant Lace Harding shouted, voice bouncing off the walls of the mountain pass below him, his name just as beautiful as the call of the horn. But not more so than when she drew back her bow again.

This time he felt the flick of wind, felt the passage of the arrow just before it appeared, quivering, in what passed for the Despair demon’s face.

Arrows - anything physical - didn’t hurt a demon as much as they would a bandit or even a Red Templar. But he’d made sure that when his scouts rode out, their weapons had sharp enough edges that most things they encountered would hesitate to attack them twice, even demons. And as head of the scouts - and as someone he was very fond of - he’d made sure Harding’s quiver had been stuffed with the finest, even when she tried to demure in favor of the rest of her scouts.

Two arrows from her, and the demon broke away from him and retreated back up the pass; closer to her, but it wouldn’t attack her, not after she’d so cleanly shot it. It also wouldn’t flee, wouldn’t jump back into the Rift, and they all knew it.

Harding blew the long, long call on her horn again, and Zak closed his eyes, the note turning into words in his mind: _Rift sighted._

The call echoed down the pass, bouncing back and forth across the walls, and the implications finally struck that warm place inside him, made hope flutter, and surge forward, stronger: if she was calling to someone, then there was someone to call - they’d landed somewhere the Inquisition had a camp.

He knew of only a handful of forward camps that were in the mountains, and all of them were in the Frostbacks. From the angle of the westerning sun, they weren’t south enough for any of the camps they had near the Avvar holdings. 

His mind was fuzzy and uncertain, but he knew what that implied. The little ember of hope flared to life again, almost painful in his chest against the cold of the snow and the despair.

Harding knew exactly what she was about. She was a scout. The very best of scouts, but her strength lay in keeping out of sight and reporting back on what was moving through a new and strange area. She still kicked her Battle Nug in the ribs and charged down the pass towards the Fade Rift, towards the Despair demon and the nearly-invisible wraiths.

It probably helped that, like it’s smaller cousins, the Battle Nug was blind, just put down a head full of curling horns (that the smaller ones mercifully lacked) and thundered down the pass, no matter there was a Despair demon in the way.

Harding was not blind, nor was she a fool. She lifted her bow and shot two more arrows in quick succession. They struck true; for a moment, he could make out the outlines of the wraiths around the arrow in the center of each. They vanished, the arrows dropping into the snow.

As he’d said: not powerful, but damned annoying without a bow. _One problem solved_. For now. Until more came through. And that spoke of far too many things on Thedas.

The Despair demon lashed an arm, breaking off the arrows that had struck it. It reared up to its full height as Harding galloped towards it; it swooped to the side, just far enough to be clear of her charge, before rushed in, claws bared.

She pivoted in the saddle, almost facing completely backwards as she drew back her bow and sighted; the fact the nug was not something that could turn easily was a boon, giving her nearly as steady a stance as she would have on her own two feet.

The nug also apparently _could_ run faster when a demon slashed its flank. Not deep; Harding fired point-blank, and the Despair demon retreated with another arrow buried in it. But the nug squealed in outrage, and its gallop turned into a headlong bolt. Directly for him.

Zak struggled to his feet, teeth bared in a snarl against the pain and full of rage, and lunged for Drizzt. Panic and that little kernel of warmth gave speed and strength to limbs that had been numbed from cold and despair: he dragged Drizzt the last few yards all in one burst. In the lee of the boulder the snow finally gave way to a nearly bare patch of ground, and if it wasn’t warmer it was still a relief not to be fighting the snow. Zak straightened with a gasp, just long enough to drag in a deep breath before the ground trembled; he dropped and shielded Drizzt’s still unconscious body.

The boulder wasn’t much cover, no, they’d never expected it to be. But it was enough that when the Battle Nug charged around the boulder, they were out of it path, and just now out of sight of the Despair demon. Zak lifted his head, shifted on his knees to watch her go by. He didn’t have a horn, so made do with a sharp whistle before cupping his hands around his mouth. “ _Scout Harding_ ,” he shouted, “ _report!_ ”

He’d never seen a nug turn on a gold sovereign, but Harding’s did better than most had a right to. Head heeling around as Harding reined it in, it made a great arc in the snow, hardly slowing until it was galloping back up to him. She sat back in the saddle, hauling on the reins, and it skidding in the snow, slowing to a lumbering trot as it drew closer, then to a halt. It promptly started snuffling at Drizzt. “Sir, listen!” Harding said when she drew close enough, words tumbling out of a mouth.

He was tired and everything hurt; for a moment, he thought she meant for him to listen to her, and dutifully waited for her explanation, the same brisk report she’d given him across any number of regions in Thedas over the last few years. But instead, her head lifted, and even the nug lifted its naked nose, nostrils flaring and ears standing up. Zak cocked his head, listened past the sound of the wind howling through the mountain peaks and the crackle of the Fade Rift and the rustling of the Despair demon.

 _There_.

From the other side of the pass, more horns faintly called, the echoes only carrying so far because of the steep walls of the mountain. But faint or not, he could hear them repeating Harding’s warning and carrying their own orders, a choir on the wind. As the sound seemed to swirl around him, his mind translated their calls automatically, from long, long experience listening for those calls across vast expanses of ground: _Rift sighted. Calvary muster. Skirmishers forward._

The horns calling to the Inquisition, so many of them this could only be one place.

Skyhold.

 _Home_.

Hope.


	6. Now: Above Skyhold

Kneeling on the cold stone ground in the middle of the mountain pass, Zak reflected he’d been wrong: going down this side of the pass would have lead them farther away from safety. Then again, he’d picked the direction because it was not towards the Fade Rift, so he’d stand by that sensible course of action.

More or less, anyways. Skyhold was close enough for horn calls to reach them, but it would still take long, cold, _dangerous_ minutes for even the skirmishers to muster and get here, not if they wanted soldiers ready to fight and not just bare-headed and unarmed. He needed to get up, needed to fight, needed to defend his son and his Lieutenant, certainly needed to close the damned Fade Rift before things got considerably worse - whatever “worse” was than just a Fade Rift between them and Skyhold with at least one irritated Despair demon.

But he set his hand on the side of the boulder, and it wasn’t just the Anchor that ached; his hand trembled, a quiver that raced up his arm and into his spine, and all he wanted to do was lean against it, rest his aching head on something solid until the world stopped kicking him in the ribs.

It was the one thing he couldn’t do. If being shoved back into a place that was no longer home had done one thing, it had reminded him of what he’d been before Thedas. He’d been ashamed of it, when the memories had crashed down into his mind after Adamant and he’d remembered what he’d done in Menzoberranzan, all the centuries of killing and the reason he understood the Orlesian Great Game so very well.

In the end, he’d accepted that he couldn’t change it: he was a drow weaponmaster, had been the commander of the Ninth House, was still the greatest drow warrior in a thousand generations. That much he could be proud of. His skill and fierce knowledge hadn’t been because of House Do’Urden; he’d made himself the finest weaponmaster in the city long before House Do’Urden had anything to do with it.

And he’d come to be honored to freely offer all his skill for the Inquisition, for all of Thedas.

He would not do any less for them now. He would not do any less for his son.

He was _better_ than being trapped on his knees, cowered behind a boulder. He was going to stand up and fight.

He tried. He pressed his hand against the stone, grabbed at the pain that shot through his arm and used it to clear his mind, tried to push himself up to his feet.

A warm hand rested on his shoulder, and the light weight and subtler pressure was enough to keep him down. He bit back a cry of despair, because Harding’s green eyes were worried enough already. “It’s alright, sir,” she said, voice as gentle as her hand, and as capable of taking him out at the knees. “I’ve got you. Here…” she added, fumbling at her side.

_There’s a Despair demon bearing down on us_ , he wanted to tell her, the words sharp on his tongue. But the Battle Nug snuffled at his hair, nose not quite as velvety as a horse’s but more delicate, and he couldn’t bring himself to swat it away, anymore than he could her. His hands were too heavy, and it would break something in him to shove away her gentleness.

A wax seal cracked; a cork popped out of a stem, so close to him the sound was loud as Orleasian fireworks. And he still couldn’t figure out what was happening until the mouth of a bottle was shoved against his mouth: he caught a whiff of elfroot, but the liquid that flooded his mouth tasted nothing like it, both bitter and floral and thick as syrup, forcing him to swallow. He coughed, hard and deep - but even as he did, something in his shoulders sagged with relief, pain lifting away like a simmering haze.

_Healing potion._ And he didn’t want to know how badly he was hurt that one gulp was enough to take the edge off.

Healing potion. Badly hurt.

He swatted at Harding’s hand, jerking his head away from the bottle, and if the flurry of struggle still hurt, it also startled her. Enough he seized the jar from her, and turned his attention to Drizzt. No matter how powerful, a healing potion couldn’t take the place of a good healer or even a pile of bandages and a week on bedrest. But it _did_ help.

Probably.

Elfroot was elfroot, he told himself as he lifted Drizzt’s head, eased his mouth open, and poured in a dribble of the potion, willing him to swallow. Elfroot worked with his injuries, and he hadn’t been born on this world. It was just magic, and didn’t care where someone came from, as long as they weren’t a spirit. But the poison in Drizzt’s leg hadn’t come from here, had come from a demon beyond the Fade, and maybe good, natural elfroot from an entirely different world couldn’t touch something caused by that sort of strange magic.

Still, Drizzt’s swallow was audible, and there was just a little trace of fog as he exhaled. Something in his chest that had nothing to do with the raking talons of a demon ebbed at the sight of it; he dribbled in a little more of the potion, then one last swallow. Not nearly enough, he knew as he eased his son back to the ground, watched a moment longer as the breath curled up from his mouth, then capped the empty bottle and handed it back to Harding.

She took a step back to the side of the Battle Nug, stored it in the saddlebags, all without looking away from him, her green eyes moving between him and Drizzt. And for the first time, he realized just how strange they looked; there were no native drow on Thedas, and he thought that was the best part of this world. 

“Is he…” Harding asked cautiously, nodding at Drizzt. And he realized that she was in fact the very best of his scouts, and saw the subtle bones beneath the easy surface.

“A long story,” he said. One for when they weren’t on the side of a mountain, facing an active Fade Rift. Maybe by the time the Inquisition got here he’d figure out how he wanted to explain that he had a son, and that son was…complicated. Even not considering the relationship between them. 

Harding had the good sense not to argue an evasive answer when they all had so many other things to worry and argue about. His shoulders felt better; the claw wounds still ached, the skin tight, but he could move them without searing pain. He placed his hand on the side of the boulder again, shifted his weight under him, feeling his way off his knees and onto his feet.

Harding placed another hand on his shoulder, this one a little firmer, but even as small as she was, she still had more than enough strength to keep him from getting any farther. He looked up to protest, and her normally-cheerful freckled face was set in firm lines. “Inquisitor, you really shouldn’t—”

“I am the Herald of Andraste,” he snapped, temper making his words short and a weapon of the title that often fitted poorly. “And I say I _will_.”

He’d never been this close to Harding when she was arguing - had never seen her argue, he realized. Not even through the long journeys across Thedas; she had always tackled whatever orders he’d set in front of her with a good will. Foolish, to think that an agreeable nature didn’t mean she was just as stubborn as any dwarf, in her own way. Her jaw set, eyes going hard as two emeralds. “No, sir, I won’t let you. Not when you’re this hurt.”

No one used the saying ‘stubborn as a drow’ but it was probably just as true, at least for him. He pushed up, and Harding narrowed her eyes at him. Then, with a deliberately careless shrug, she dropped her hand from his shoulder and stepped back, giving him room to stand.

One hand on the boulder, he managed to rise. He even managed to take a step forward. And promptly fell into the snow, a pithy and effective argument. By the time he struggled back up to his knees, brushing at the wet cold of the snow, she was already mounted on her Battle Nug and had an arrow nocked and drawn, pointed up the pass towards the Fade Rift.

Even without being able to see it, he recognized the sound of it surging, growing; green light blazed as it again blossomed, throwing out arcs that sizzled as they hit the snow, something not quite heat but full of power. He’d been waiting for it, and struggled to get his feet under him again, to rise and fight. They had seconds, and precious few seconds at that, while it expanded. Then all the demons pressing against the other side would drop out, and he prayed to the Maker, the Creators, whatever Faerun gods were listening, that they were out of its range and weren’t going to get a demon dropping directly onto their heads.

As it was, there would be too many, too close. And he didn’t intend to sit on his ass in the snow and watch Harding die for him. He _couldn’t_ sit next to his son and only _pray_ the Inquisition would get here in time to save all of them.

With Harding too distracted by the Fade Rift to hold him down, Zak pushed himself to his feet. The world swam around him, a blur of white and green light that made him light-head, but he was braced for that now, enough take a staggering step towards the Battle Nug. She’d have knives in her pack; all scouts did, mostly because that had been his first order when he’d realized he had scouts to order. It had been something he had been sure he knew, and was comfortable with knowing _how_ he knew, unlike the battle-sense that had been terrifyingly instinctive.

He took a step, and stumbled against the side of the Battle Nug; Harding was distracted enough she didn’t notice, but like horses, nugs didn’t like being touched unexpectedly. It squealed, the soft pink skin flinching under his hand as if he’d held a knife already. It hopped away, sideways and deeper into the snow, before Harding could soothe it.

But just far enough that his hand slipped off from its side, and unbalanced, he ended up on his knees in the snow. Again.

It occurred to him, distant as the sound of the hissing Fade Rift and a scream of a Despair demon, that Scout Harding might have been right: he was in no condition to fight. He knew that the potions helped heal wounds, but serious ones took more than a few sips - often more than one potion. He could very well rip open whatever healing had been done; the bitter knowledge kept him from rising again this time.

Right up until the Despair demon screamed, something different in its wordless voice. His heart sank as Harding shouted, the Battle Nug squealing and shying away, further down the pass and away. He couldn’t blame it, or Harding for needing a better angle for a shot.

Because a _second_ Despair demon scared in answer.

It swept over the boulder twisted and avoided Harding’s arrow. The second struck it, but mid-body, and something that would be fatal on an ordinary foe just had the demon lashing out with a claw full of magic.

The Battle Nug squealed again, fading, and he couldn’t tell if it was galloping farther away or if he just couldn’t hear right. Harding shouted, but it was so far away, far as the horns of the Inquisition, when the hem of its tattered robe hovered just at his eyeline and she was somewhere farther.

So close. The Anchor throbbed as he closed his hand into a fist, denying a slim hope. They were so very close, and he could do nothing to avert this fate, just as he hadn’t before; all this had only won him a few more minutes grace.

But that had been just enough time.

The Despair demon dipped lower, cut him off from Harding, a flood of rippling black filling his vision. Zak braced himself for the blow. Instead, shadows rippled, light piercing them, and the demon screamed again in anger and fear, frantically retreating. He blinked, not quite certain of what he was seeing, until another shadow fell over his face.

He looked up just in time to watch Cassandra Allegra Portia Calogera Filomena Pentaghast leap from the boulder after the demon.

She struck it sword-first. Her blade slammed deep into its chest, and momentum bore it to the ground. It writhed, and though he knew it was bigger than them both together, with her pinning it to the ground, it seemed smaller, a lump of dirty black rags over a very tiny dog who might have sharp teeth and be unhappy about being contained, but could do nothing. Not when Cassandra wrenched her sword free, only to drive it back in, a precise and vicious movement. The demon stopped writhing, and Cassandra stabbed it once more, more for form.

He was still on his knees in the snow, but the cold track down his face wasn’t from the snow melt. He just pretended not to notice. He’d thought he’d been glad to see Harding, and he still was. But Cassandra was in full armor, the white sword and eye of the Inquisition blazing on her chest, hand steady and competent on her sword, shield light on her arm, guarding without constraining, and she was utterly beautiful.

“ _Stay down_ ,” she told him through gritted teeth, and his legs decided to follow her orders and stop trying to stand before his mind properly caught up. He sank back down, and at least had enough of presence of mind to press back towards the shallower snow of the boulder’s lee.

Closer to Drizzt. He only had time for a glance, barely more than a dart of eyes, just enough to see he was still unconscious, but also still breathing. It was enough.

He looked back to find Cassandra’s steady - and entirely too knowing - pale eyes following his gaze, before meeting his again. She gave him a shallow nod, and whatever she thought, she only whirled and raised her shield, caught another long stream of white magic square in the center of the boss, where she could brace against it with barely a grunt.

It seemed to last forever, though it was no more than an aching long minute. The demon tried shifting the line of the ice-magic to slide under the shield edge. Cassandra adjusted, dipped the edge just enough to catch it without exposing the rest of her, hands graceful on the shield as most were on a sword. He didn’t have to be overly fond of using one himself to admire when it was done well; even when he’d been her prisoner, he’d admired her skill, though it had caused strange, uneasy notes in his gut to have a powerful female in charge.

But Cassandra was nothing like a drow female. And proved it when the demon broke away from her, and it’s shriek didn’t cover the human voices shouting something on the other side of their position. She only said, “Good, reinforcements.”

“Who—” he started to ask, until she shot him a withering look and he wondered if it really mattered who among the Inquisition had been as fast to the saddle as she was, so long as they were here _now._

He expected her to go off and command them. In his defense, he’d spent a very long month surrounded by memories of when a female would have left him to fend for himself while she took the glory. It still shouldn’t have come as a surprise when she stayed at his side; it did anyways, and formed another little ball of warmth into his belly: not pleasure, exactly, but happiness, absurd though it was given their present circumstances.

Harding guarded one flank of the boulder, and Cassandra took the other, setting her position with grim purpose; Harding had the reach with her bow and the height from her mount, and Cassandra was a steady bulwark of sword and shield against the cold and the demons who came too close. 

Tucked between his two soldiers, he couldn’t see much. The Fade Rift was crackling, and that meant either it was expanding or more demons were coming through. Or worse, when he heard someone scream up the pass: not a wraith, too high and too human. “Arcane Horror!” Harding shouted, and there was raw, high note in her voice at what they called a Pride demon that possessed a mage’s corpse. It meant it had less in the way of a Pride demon’s claws, but much more in the way of spellcasting ability.

Even as Cassandra swore, Zak surged to his feet, purpose driving him, and this time, she reached out and grabbed his arm, balanced him much the same way he’d balanced Drizzt. “You need to close the Rift - _now_.” 

He nodded. “I need the Arcane Horror and the rest of them kept off me.” He flexed his left hand, felt the Anchor shoot a pain up his arm, and winced. “You know that’s what they’re waiting for.”

Cassandra nodded. There wasn’t even a flicker in her eyes as she dropped flat and dragged him down with her, her armor digging into him as she covered him. Green energy filled the space where they had just been, a ball of lightning powered by the Fade. The light had barely passed when he was struggling from under Cassandra. “Harding?” he shouted.

“Dodged it, sir!” she shouted back. There was still an edge in her voice, and made him wonder just how close it had been to her. Cries of pain and fear made him think that those soldiers who’d managed to get here hadn’t been nearly so lucky.

Those were _his people_ , come to save him, and the Arcane Horror would pick them off at leisure, or slow them enough for the Despair demon. He exchanged a glance with Cassandra as she fluidly pushed up from the ground, and helped him to rise. “As they’re also content to kill us now, the point is moot,” she said.

With that, she proceeded to half-drag him around the boulder; he tried to help, tried to at least get his feet under him and step so that she didn’t have to drag him through the snow, but when she had set her eyes on a task, Cassandra wasn’t stubborn: she would just see that it was done.

She shoved him against the other side of the boulder, facing the Fade Rift, and took up a defensive position in front of him. Brandishing sword and shield, she made herself a wonderful target for the demons and that Arcane Horror - similar in appearance to the Despair demons with robes, but theirs were bloodstained red hanging off a fleshless body - floating above the snow. Or, a rally point. “To the Inquisitor!” she shouted, voice carrying through the pass, brighter and stronger than any horn. “ _To the Inquisitor!_ ”

It was ugly. The snow was red with blood, vivid against the faded green light of the rift playing over the snow. Black armor stark against the snow, his soldiers were arrayed in an arch on the far end of the pass, barely come over the crest of the ridge; the Fade Rift and all its attendant horrors drifted through the valley between them and him. But each and every one of the Inquisition did what Harding had done, and dared the run down the pass, fighting their way to his side, and that was it own swell of warm pride.

Right up until first few, braver or more reckless, broke away from the main body and charged straight at the demons: the Despair demons scattered, not wanting to take their chances against that many blades, but the Arcane Horror almost lazily drifted higher in the air, and with a flick of its bone hand, set the soldiers aflame.

Zak’s heart closed around terror as they screamed, as the Despair demons lazily turned and launched their icy beams at easy targets. But these were skirmishers who had held ground facing Fade Rifts before, and he and Cullen had trained them well. Even as it was on his tongue to tell Cassandra to break off the attack, those aflame dropped: not dead, but rolling in the snow, fighting the flames. Other soldiers broke off from the main pack, veering off to help and defend their comrades. He had just one flash of memory, of drow soldiers facing the same situation: they’d ignore the fallen, or bluntly finish them off.

And that’s why this place was _home_.

He’d fight for his home and his people with more willingness than he would for anyone, save his son. He managed to straighten against the boulder, and if he couldn’t stand on his own, at least he could balance himself enough to stay upright. He shoved his left hand towards the Rift, and the power burned in him, burned through him, splitting his skin apart with pain and fire. He couldn’t use the pain as a focus, could only ride it, push through it, and strike out at the Fade Rift.

He was only just within range, and only then because he’d had a great deal of practice doing this; the flash of green was a thin, uneven line as it shot through the air, flared dully as it struck the Rift, and hurt so much more for being so very fragile. He ground his teeth together, thought of elfroot, and pushed at the edges of the Rift, pushed them towards that gaping hole in the Veil.

There was one benefit to all this; he’d made the Rift minutes ago, not hours or days. In spite of what was pouring out through it, it was comparatively fragile. Even at a distance, even reeling and unsteady on his feet, the Rift responded to the push. It collapsed in on itself, a tangle of edges and frayed strands that lashed at his hand before surging forward, arcing in its terrible blooms again as it rebounded because it might be new and comparatively small but it wasn’t quite so simple.

But it weakened the Rift, and he’d never learned if it was that weakened Rift or the Anchor itself that made the demons and the Arcane Horror scream, louder than his soldiers had. Either way, it was a fierce, grim pleasure.

So did sight of the heavy crossbow bolt that struck the Arcane Horror, heavier and even more distinctive than Harding’s - and from her shout behind him, she recognized it, too. As the tiny figure at the top of the pass shouldered the crossbow and started the hard sprint through the snow, she sent a trio of arrows flying, one for each of the Despair demons, just enough for a distraction for the soldiers, and for Varric.

In spite of the fact that the soldiers arguably had a headstart on him - as well as longer legs - Varric reached his side first. “Blades, not that I’m not glad to see you, but you ever think about _not_ bringing demons home with you?” Varric asked as he skidding to a halt in the snow, dropping to a knee at his side, already busy reloading Bianca.

“You know I love my work,” Zak managed, pressed his hand against the boulder to cool it, at least an effort to numb the pain. “How did you _get_ here?” he had to ask, because he knew what was and was not possible about moving troops through these mountains.

Varric shrugged as he stood and braced Bianca against his shoulder; the crossbow’s arms swung out from the aiming sight, the distinctive X that Varric swore helped. “If we’re going to explain why we’re freezing our asses off halfway up a mountain on Skyhold’s doorstep - you first, Blades.”

On his other side, Cassandra radiated disapproval, but gave a grunt of agreement. Or that was a grunt because she caught another icy blast on her shield, stabbed up with her sword at it with reflexes Zak empathized with. “Stories later, Varric,” she growled.

Zak swayed to press his back against the boulder, gave Varric a clean line of sight. Varric pivoted, sighted, sent a bolt even more heavily enchanted than Harding’s into the demon, an economy of motion Zak approved of and only rarely had a chance to see up close. “That’s not what you said the last time I told you there was a publication delay,” Varric said even as he arced Bianca’s nose down and stepped into the stirrup to haul her string back.

Cassandra only made that noise that meant she was thoroughly disgruntled with the conversation; ignoring Varric, she advanced shield-first, and caught the demon a glancing bow as it swooped out of Varric’s line of sight. It spun away, fleeing up the pass - directly into the swords of the soldiers. Not quite as enchanted as any of the weapons in his Inner Circle, but there was enough of them, and soldiers knew what they were doing. The demon screamed as it tried to flee one group of soldiers and ran straight into a second, screamed as the swords pierced it, screamed as it tore apart into a ball of shadows, and blew away in the wind.

The first squad of soldiers reached him, and fanned out around the boulder, in front of him and - his heart ached when he watched them fall into place - around the back, leaving Cassandra, Varric, and Harding as the fixed points in the ring. The demons surged forward after them, but this time there were many arrows and even more swords raised to drive them off, and they fled back; moving too fast to be pinned down by anything but an extremely lucky or skilled shot, but that also meant they were too busy to attack.

The Arcane Horror, on the other hand, had plenty of time and space. It gestured again, tattered mage robes fluttering around it. Green balls of light leapt from each of its fingers, and Cassandra commanded: “Shields!”

Most got them up in time. But most of them were not Seekers like Cassandra. Her shield absorbed the green magic, he was fairly sure it had runes but was mostly just good steel. However good their equipment, the energy had to go somewhere, and often that was still into flesh.

A series of yelps rose up around him, and one soldier dropped his shield entirely - he dove for the edge that struck up from the snow, and the Despair demon struck. Zak shouted a warning, even as white ice shot out from the Despair demon, coated the soldier’s head and neck in ice. He cried out, just once, then fell horribly silent and still.

“Close it,” someone growled in his hear, and for the life of him he didn’t know if it was Cassandra or his own voice. Pain didn’t help to focus the abilities, but anger did, it always had. Zak stretched out his hand and focused on the shimmering Fade Rift, fixed his gaze on the rippling green light, the lazy arcs and spikes of it, until the snow, the Arcane Horror, the demons, even his own soldiers fell away.

All that existed was him, and the Rift, and the Anchor that connected them.

It was easy, to shove that power out from him until it connected with the Fade Rift, easy, to push his strength down the bond of green and magic, reach into the Fade Rift and yank its sides together, force it into itself and to seal.

It just hurt.

It didn’t matter, he couldn’t let it matter. Zak focused on the Rift, focused on how unnatural it was, how this place was supposed to be whole because this was his _home_ , and poured in the last of his strength, the last of his will, down through the twisting green magic and into the Fade Rift.

It boomed, flaring out, and the demons and the Arcane Horror shrieked with one voice as they were unwillingly pulled towards the Rift. They were momentarily dark shadows against the twisting surface of the Rift, and then dissolved into it - destroyed or dragged back to the Fade, it didn’t matter. The Rift shimmered, and fell into itself with a cloud of green mist that drifted towards the snow before the wind seemed to sweep it away, gone as if it had never been.

Zak fell to his knees again, and couldn’t see anything except white and black: unnervingly both at the same time. There was shouting next to him, but it sounded as though it came from far away, underwater. He turned his head to see, to ask Varric or Cassandra what was wrong with him, what was wrong with them. The world went dark and still around him, and he didn’t think.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I use Cassandra's full name to hit the NaNoWriMo word count? Look no one can prove anything.


	7. Then: Faerun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A look back to a set of scenes that happened during _Timeless_.

_Chirp. Chirp. Trill-chirrup_.

No, Zak decided as the bird repeated its song, he definitely hadn't heard a bird like that on Thedas, and that was why it was unsettling. _Just a strange bird,_ he told himself firmly, and closed his eyes, trying to go back to sleep.

 _Chirp. Chirp. Trill-chirrup-chirrup_.

Strange bird or not, it was noisy, far too loud for something the size of a songbird. The last time he'd heard birds that loud, it had been in the Emerald Graves. Behind his closed eyes, he could see the forest, as unearthly green as the Fade - even the shadows beneath the castle-sized trees had been tinged in green. He could almost _smell_ it, the cool, almost musky loam and the faint, lingering trace of long-gone flowers.

Achingly alive and overshadowed with death beneath those high branches had been a stillness they all sensed. They’d whispered even when there was little need, huddled together for companionship again the sense that something deep in the forest watched them, breathing and judging. They’d flinched when twigs snapped in the distance, even knowing it was nothing more than a deer - or at worst a poacher. The birds rustled through the branches too high above their head, their songs impossibly loud.

The crackling of a Fade Rift was a relief, something they could deal with: he caught a glimpse of one between the trunks of trees, and at his side Cassandra shouted —

 _Chirp. Chirp. Trill-chirrup_.

 _Reverie_. Zak blinked, and the timber and thatch ceiling came back into focus above him. Reverie, that unsettling and unpleasant reliving of true memories when he closed his eyes at night.

On Thedas, he’d slept at night like everyone else, and his dreaming mind slipped to the Fade; pieces and parts of his memories had swam around him and sliced together, warping the Fade around him. Not really any more comfortable, he judged, especially as he was well aware he had pissed off a lot of demons and was in their territory. 

But at least it had been something different. It hadn’t been seeing his failures all over again, feeling tacky blood on his hands, smelling the iron from them, and knowing that even if he struggled to do something differently, even if he raged at the world, he couldn’t change it.

He'd get no true sleep here, and he didn't want to slide back into Reverie again. Not when the memories of near and distant past were already seeped into every word spoken here; not when he woke with a companion's name on his tongue and couldn't explain who they were and why they mattered so very much.

Zak tried not to sigh as he pushed himself up from the bed, pressed fingers to his tired eyes. He'd been used to Reverie, once; he'd lived three hundred years with it. He'd get used to it again.

He was also used to working on very little sleep, and he thought that would be an easier adjustment to make under the circumstances.

Perhaps he could pretend it was because of the bed, he mused as he leaned forward and pulled the pack of clothing over to him from the foot of the bed. No, that was hardly fair. By the standards of any cabin in the woods - aside from the Orlesian monstrosities in the Emerald Graves - this was a luxurious one, to have not just a single room, but two separate bedrooms. And it wasn't fair to judge the mattress thin and lumpy, rag-stuffed, when he was used to his own being larger and filled with down.

He'd slept on worse with the Dalish clan, he told himself; then it had been a wool pad directly on the ground. He'd slept on still worse than that on any given day traveling across Thedas; more than once he'd fallen gratefully onto his bedroll after a day of fighting and hadn’t noticed if the ground was rock or mud under him.

But as the bird sang above his head and he lifted the pack, his back gave a twinge, low, as if to say _I do not forgive you this night_. 

Stretches would help: he was always very good at making his body obey when he commanded it. Zak pushed up from the bed and stepped forward, all instinct. He stopped in his tracks as his surroundings caught up with him. Home, he had room enough to do all his warm-ups right there in his quarters before he dressed. But the cabin might be luxurious with two bedrooms but it wasn't nearly as large enough for that. 

_Never mind_ , he told himself. Outside in the clean air would suit him just as well, particularly at this hour just as dawn crested.

 _Chirp. Chirp. Trill-chirrup_. 

That bird really was louder than a songbird should be. He scowled at the shuttered window as he pulled on a pair of black trousers that fit tolerably well through the leg. It couldn't be nearly as large as he was imagining, but his mind kept playing with the thought of an enormous bird in the treetops below...

Above. The treetops _above_. He sat down on the edge of the bed, looked up briefly to the ceiling for patience, and pulled his boots towards him so long as he was there. There weren't many trees in Skyhold proper, and the ones that had taken root in the courtyards and inner garden were weedy things, not nearly as tall as the walls encompassing them, and certainly didn’t reach their branches up to his balcony. So of course he was most used to hearing birds singing _below_ him, and farther away, and that was all.

"Mystery solved," Zak murmured, and stood to set his heel properly into the boots. 

Just as he supposed what his mind kept insisting was silence was only the lack of the mountain wind swirling around his tower, cold and dangerous but it's own kind of melody, carrying the scent of clean snow and scored rock down from the pass. Just as this room wasn't dark, it just lacked the expanse of stained glass windows that let light and color pour into his quarters. It had been a kindness on their part, he was sure, and years ago he would have needed when light of any kind made his eyes ache. He just didn’t need the dark any longer.

Just different. But that didn't mean his heart didn't ache for home as he sorted out the tunics in the pack, trying to decide which of the two he'd been loaned were the least wrinkled - which he hated less, he admitted. He never thought he would miss the multiple formal outfits that had been made for him; never would have thought that he would have wanted to wear one in front of his son, when he'd always known that they were something that could be used to make nearly the same point as armor, with less sharp edges.

He pulled the red tunic over his head, mostly to stop that particular line of thoughts, smoothing it down over the same shirt he'd slept in - but if it too was disreputable at least it was hidden now, and he really did only have one. At least he’d made it a point to never travel without more than one pair of gloves; he reached for the thinnest pair now, soft black leather that nearly matched the shade of his skin that nicely hid the Anchor.

He pressed his thumb into his left palm, rubbing; the Anchor hissed and seethed at the pressure, but at least it wasn't actively crackling the way it could back home. It was still a sharp green glow on his hand that he hadn't had before he died. And he absolutely did not want to explain it. Or at least not yet, when it was not just tied up in where he'd been, but who he _was_. 

Perhaps it was selfish of him, to want Drizzt to actually _ask_ if he knew where he'd been once he'd died. To ask if he knew how he'd come back.

Perhaps it didn't matter to his son. Perhaps it was that he thought it enough that he _was_ returned to life.

Why did that, too, feel like a lie? 

He’d never done well with ignoring his instinct, but Zak tried to as he pushed open the bedroom door and stepped into the main room of the cabin. It served as kitchen, dining room, and sitting room all in one, and as such he wasn’t entirely surprised Drizzt and Catti-brie curved together by the main hearth. 

He stepped across the threshold, and made sure that his footstep made the floorboard shift and ease, not quite a squeak from the new wood, but loud enough to announce his presence. 

Drizzt glanced up, and even across the room Zak saw something flick into his eyes, tighten around his mouth, harder and darker than just surprise. "You're awake," he said, flatly. 

“A bird woke me,” he said, shrugging. It wasn’t his habit to sleep in even this late; there was too much to be done. Except there wasn’t anything for him to do here, save sleep, and train, and visit with them. The walls of the cabin felt close to his shoulders, and he stepped a little closer, trying to see what was on the hearth. “I don’t suppose there’s tea?”

“We generally don’t in the morning,” Drizzt said, not quite so grudging, not quite suspicious. But not far off either.

"If you're hungry-" Catti began, turning a little, one hand fluttering around the soft swell of her belly as she did, that instinctive gesture towards her pregnancy. 

The reminder gave his conscience a prick - more than dealing with any Orlesian ever had. He was a guest here, but he was also intruding on their time together. And he certainly didn’t need them to entertain him when they wanted to be alone. "Later, perhaps," he said, stepping to the cottage door. "I want to work in a practice session."

"I'll join you," Drizzt said, taking a step forward. He had just a moment to hope it was an offer of company, but one look showed Drizzt still had that darkness in his eyes.

"There's hardly a need," Zak said. "I'm not looking for a fight." 

"For a change," Drizzt said, and Zak had to shrug, giving him the point: he was well known in Menzoberranzan and Skyhold for not backing down from fights, and starting a few that he would still argue needed to be started - and winning them. 

But this wasn't Menzoberranzan, or Skyhold, or somewhere on the road in Thedas. He'd been told, frequently, that this place was relatively safe. If he was mildly interested in the werewolves that apparently roamed the forest, he'd been firmly told that they weren't his responsibility to take care of. 

_(Because they didn't think he could kill them? Or didn't think he'd be able to keep himself from doing so_?)

It didn't matter, not really; his back was sore, his hands were aching, and a peaceful blade-dance followed by a set of slow stretches would set him right for the day. 

* * *

Zaknafein grimaced and winced in the sun, and it sicked Drizzt's heart to watch. 

The weaponsmaster was as skilled as he ever had been, hands sure on the hilts of his swords and graceful as he carved out each attack, each parry, against invisible enemies. Drizzt could almost follow along with him, something in his bones tugging in the correct direction just before Zaknafein executed the parry; it had been more than a hundred years since Zaknafein had trained him and yet he still remembered the drill.

No, he didn't just _remember_ the drill. There was a small corner of him that kept expecting Zaknafein to turn and bark at him, tell him to start moving, as he'd done every morning those years he'd been in his care. Even after so long, each morning he drilled, there was a small corner that still felt Zaknafein's hands on his wrists, his elbows, his back, correcting his stance, his grip; a corner of him that could feel the weaponmaster's critical circle of his form, felt the weight of his nod of approval. 

There was a corner of his skin that lit up with heat and pain when Zaknafein didn't think he'd been respectful enough and casually struck him. Never during drill; his skin well remember the flashes of pain after a dropped parry, but even as a novice he’d understood that a mistake in battle meant death, and the bruise from a practice-blade was a reminder. He suspected Zaknafein considered the bruise from his hand to be a reminder not to mouth off where a priestess could overhear him, but those bruises had always ached more than ones that came from honest training. 

To be fair, even at his most critical, he remembered well enough that Zaknafein's temper had never been as uncertain as his mother's and his sisters'; he had been given far more beatings from Briza than the weaponmaster.

But nor could he forget the ones that had come from his hands.

Just as he couldn't forget that Zaknafein had never been to the surface, and was a drow, with all a drow's innate prejudice: hatred of the sun, and hatred of anyone not drow. Zaknafein didn’t have to say a word about either of them for it to be very clear what he thought. His eyes had lingered well enough over the humans and dwarves to make his opinions clear.

Catti had suggested last night, when they spoke quietly together after they were alone, that perhaps this was all they might hope for, and that it wasn't a _bad_ thing that he held those opinions, only that he'd never been outside the Underdark and knew no other way of being. "Give him time," she had said. 

But Drizzt had known what was good and what was evil in the Underdark, and it hadn't taken him centuries to figure out. And he had forged a path that had allowed him to live without compromising his beliefs. He refused to believe Zaknafein - the legendary weaponmaster - could have done any less.

He'd just chosen not to. 

And what good would it do, to give him time? What good would letting him harbor his beliefs, let them seethe behind his closed mouth and behind red eyes that were almost the shape of Drizzt's own but otherwise were just the same as every other drow? 

"I meant what I said," Zaknafein said, almost lazily as he lowered his blades, turning away to find the sheaths from where he'd set them against a tree. "I'm not after a fight today." 

"Then it is just as well I'm not after a fight today, either," Drizzt said, and tried very hard not to snap out the words, to give Zaknafein what he wanted - no matter what he claimed.

"What are you after?" Zaknafein asked. Though he'd turned to work sword frogs back through his belt to settle the blades at his hips, there was a cock to his head that was less curiosity and more challenge. 

Not a fight, he reminded himself. Put the two of them back in the cabin, and Catti would inevitably have to be in the middle of them, and she certainly didn't deserve to weather either of their tempers lashing out. "I had thought to hunt for fresh meat for supper," he said curtly. 

Surprisingly, Zaknafein turned and looked interested. "Rabbits, I would expect, or ducks?" he said. "It's hardly the season for deer, after all. Have you a trapline?"

He wasn't wrong, Drizzt realized, surprised; with deer, this was the time of year does had fawns, and bucks lacked antlers that made it easy to tell them apart from the more-vulnerable females. It meant it was best to not risk the shot, to consider other prey instead.

_How_? That was not something even many people on the surface knew, not unless they were from a small village with either the rights to take deer from their local lord, or a thriving poaching trade; most who lived in cities such as Waterdeep, or even a village large enough to have its own butcher shop, knew where meat came from, but not the particulars of how it was hunted. 

Zaknafein was just wrong about those particulars. "No," he said, and at least tried not to be quite as curt. "I find a trapline needlessly cruel." He always hated the thought of them, hated that a hunter could set the snare and walk away, and then later wander back to see if he had managed to catch something - something that died strangling itself in the trap, struggling to get free. It felt very much like something drow would do in the Underdark. 

Zaknafein raised an eyebrow, hooked his hands over his belt again. "But far more efficient than hoping to stumble on your prey on a single hunting trip," he said. 

He had spent a hundred years on the surface as a hunter; he’d survived ten years in the Underdark offf what he could hunt. He absolutely did not need Zaknafein’s lectures on the topic, or his ethics. "And efficiency is all that matters, doesn't it," he snapped.

"When you're hungry, yes, efficiency matters a very great deal," Zaknafein returned, then lifted his hands for peace. "I had said I didn't wish a fight," he said, and even managed to sound somewhat apologetic.

Though not for the topic, Drizzt noted with disgust; just that he hadn't rolled over and said he was right. He refused to give Zaknafein what he wanted, refused to challenge him on ethical grounds.

His silence had clearly said what he’d meant it to, because after a moment, Zaknafein added, "And it seems you do not desire company on this hunting trip, either." 

No, he couldn't say that he really wanted Zaknafein along on a trip where he killed things. He certainly didn't question that Zaknafein would be able to move silently through the forest; they were both drow, and had both gone through the same training that made them silent on their feet, even with unfamiliar circumstances and surroundings. Zaknafein could probably even track well enough, for much the same reason. But he had tracked and killed living things that weren't quite as innocent as deer, and had made no disguise of how much he'd enjoyed the result. 

"I favor hunting alone now as well as during the full moon," he said. When he most certainly couldn't bring Zaknafein along, not if he wanted any of the werewolves to survive to be possibly cured.

For a moment, Zaknafein looked as though he'd protest. But then he shook his head and stepped back. "As you like," he said. "I hope that you would at least take a hunting horn should you run into trouble."

A hunting horn? what good would that do? He’d long known that calling attention to himself would have brought more trouble down on his head than whatever he'd run into. And it had been a long, long time since he'd been caught by something he couldn't outrun or outfight. Not that Zaknafein had any knowledge of how long it had been, how much he had learned since leaving the Underdark. "There's no trouble in these woods," he said, when his heart wanted to scream _I am not a child and do not need your protection_. 

Zaknafein could not read his mind. But there was something in his eyes that was very sad, as if he could hear those angry words. And for just a moment, he felt ashamed, because no, Zak _didn't_ know how long it had been, how much he'd learned, and whatever faults could be laid on his head, that wasn't one of them. "Then, as there's no danger in the forest," he said, carefully polite, "I think I'll take a walk."

"You can't." 

The words were out of his mouth before he'd given it any thought, a lashing strike worthy of anything Zaknafein had ever taught him. He probably very much deserved the look of shocked hurt that flashed across Zaknafein's face. But it was gone in an instant, hardening into anger that was so familiar it burned. "Am I a prisoner here?" he asked, too sharp to be polite. 

Just like him, to twist and parry with a stab, a lunge, covering ground to win by a fierce attack that drew more blood than he'd shed. "No," he countered, feeling the twist of the words as the parry it was, and shouldn't have been - why couldn't they ever simply _talk_? Besides the fact that Zaknafein never simply _talked_ : no matter what he claimed it was always a fight. "No, you're not a prisoner, but you shouldn't wander far, when..." When he still winced in the sunlight, set his teeth against it as if it caused him physical pain. "When this place is unfamiliar to you," he finished, and knew that it was a weaker parry than he should have. 

Zaknafein cocked his head, ever so slightly, considering the words, just as he considered a stance and a grip. Then his jaw tightened. "There's a river nearby," he said, nodding towards it; he could hear it clearly as Zaknafein could, given they both had better hearing than humans. "Is that close enough to be considered _familiar ground_?" he asked, voice sliding to that sharp, drawling sarcasm that had been his blade and whip in the Underdark.

For just a moment, he hated him, hated that with two words, with a tone - without even words, just by being who and what he was, _here_ \- he dragged up all those memories he'd left behind him long ago when he chose to make for himself a better life and move on from the pain he'd carried. He'd forgotten his life in the Underdark, pushed the trauma aside until it didn’t hardly affect his dreams, and had been happy that way.

Until Zaknafein had come back. 

Guilt pricked, but not quite as much as anger, however unworthy of him. He simply could not stay here and not-fight with his father a moment longer. "Do as you like, then," he said, and before Zaknafein could argue, turned on his heel and strode for the cabin to collect his bow and hunting knife and coil of rope, all those small things he would need in the forest. Doing so kept his hands from busy, kept him from wondering just who he was hurting most with all of this: Zaknafein, or himself.

* * *

That had gone well, Zak thought with disgust as he settled down at the bank of the river. 

It was odd to think that they had hunting in common now. He hadn't quite known how he had become so very good at it among the Dalish, with no memories of being taught or at least surviving on his own. But it hadn't mattered, not when the clan was hungry and he _was_ very good at stalking, good at keeping his hands steady through a single shot, clean through the heart. Or setting a line of snares through the woods, just where what he was after might stray into them, and quickly die. However he’d gained the skills, he'd been able to feed hungry people, and their appreciation had just been a little ripple through him, something he hadn't looked too closely at.

But at least here, he didn't feel the need to explain himself. What did it matter, if he shared an interest? If they had something they might talk about that didn't involve his past, or their past, or the future being forged here? He'd thought he might at least be able to have a conversation with his son that hadn't ended with one of them storming off.

Instead, both of them had, and whatever guilt he felt over doing so wasn't quite enough to cover the grumpy indignation that had made his tongue so very sharp.

 _Maker's breath_ , he wasn't a child and evidently he wasn't a prisoner. If he was not a huntmaster of Clan Lavellan, he was still a weaponmaster of House Do'Urden, and he could make his way through an unfamiliar territory without stumbling over his own feet or anything else. 

Perhaps he had been overly eager. Perhaps the reason had nothing to do with him; perhaps his son only meant that he was used to hunting on his own, and a hunting trip always went smoother with fewer distractions.

Perhaps. He was coming to hate that damned word and all the excuses that trailed after it. Zak snorted to himself, very tempted to throw something into the river, and instead tugged off his gloves to flex his hands in the cool morning air, at least try to ease the Anchor's prickling aches.

It would be a very pretty lie, if Drizzt claimed that as his reasoning; he knew full well why Drizzt truly didn't want him to hunt, whether deer or werewolves. It made little sense, given Drizzt had seen his skill, but trust was trust, and at some point in all this, the trust that had been between them had been lost.

And that rankled, because he had come here for one reason, and it wasn't to see lands that were very much like the ones he'd just left. He'd come to see his son, and his son kept slapping away any sense of connection he tried to forge, kept walking away from him and eyeing him with suspicious purple eyes - and except for the color, they could have been any drow's eyes. It ached nearly as badly as the rest of him did. 

Zak tried not to sigh as he forced his shoulders to relax, and at least tried to do what he’d come out here to do and stretch.

By now, his muscles were too cold to make the stretches as useful as he’d hoped; even that little mercy was denied him. He still breathed in the wet scent of the river, and at least tried. There was some comfort in the old weaponmaster knowledge, the slow, steadying breaths coupled with long, surprisingly gentle stretches, asking his body to relax. His cold muscles pulled and complained, and he was patient with them, with himself, waited until they relaxed into the stretch at last, joints and spine popping satisfyingly as they resettled. 

Under it all was the deep purling rush of the river, the reason he had thought to walk here to begin with. If he closed his eyes, as he listened to its song he could almost believe himself back in the Emerald Graves, and in a better place than he had when he’d first woken. He could almost picture that particular river bend where the water rushed and burbled, shallow over the protruding rocks of the ford, somewhere in the distance the thundering rush of a waterfall crashing down into a deep pool.

It had been peaceful, once they'd closed the Fade Rift on the other side; more so when they'd pulled the dead body out of the pool and burned her properly. Cassandra had insisted, had said that it was only fitting and right, and that otherwise, with how thin the Veil was in the Emerald Graves they were just asking for a spirit to lodge itself inside the corpse and wake them up in the middle of the night trying to stab them.

There'd been little else they could do for her, and so he'd helped gather the wood, helped light the fire, watched the body burn - even if he would never be used to the smell that was far too similar to their evening campfire. Just as sometimes it felt he did little good closing the Rifts after they'd been open for long weeks or months and demons had come through, ravaging the land and killing or driving off - or possessing - anything living.

But he wasn't there now. Zak opened his eyes, letting out a long breath, and released the last stretch as he looked over and saw that the river was too shallow to be the one that ran through the Emerald Graves - that ran all the way through to Red Crossing, he imagined. This was just a little river on Faerun that ran to the Sea of Swords, and if it had a name it hadn't appeared on any map he'd seen. It sounded much the same, but that was the only similarity.

That, and apparently he could do as little good here as he could on Thedas. He tried to set the bleak thought aside, tried to focus his breathing and ease his heartbeat, but it lurked just around the edges: what was the point of being here, if his son didn't want him?

Something rustled behind him, and he reached first for his swords, a lifetime's instinct honing a reaction and effectively tightening muscles he'd spent this time trying to loosen, before even looking over his shoulder. The trees were too thick; he could see nothing. It was just as well that a drow didn't rely on eyesight to identify a foe. He cocked his head, listening to the little rustles, the confident steps, and recognized both light shoes and the swish of skirts. 

There were two most likely candidates, particularly coming from this side of the river, and he wasn't entirely sure which he least wanted to see. He hadn't quite figured it out when Catti-brie stepped out from the woodland path, a basket over her arm. "I know you said you didn't wish breakfast, but you _did_ say later," she said, and if her smile was uncertain, at least her eyes were kind.

He set his swords down and grabbed his gloves instead, tugging them on as he stood to greet her properly. And so that he wasn't sitting at her feet staring up at her, put in a position of inferiority - he'd had quite enough of being treated as a child for this morning. "So I did," he said, and with one last twist of the glove to properly cover his left hand, he reached out to take the basket from her. Not quite settling it on his own arm, he flipped back the plain linen cloth covering it, at least curious to see what she had brought. 

A few slices of dark, nutty bread, toasted even darker. A tiny pot of what was likely jam nestled next to them. A few hardboiled eggs in a protective jar. A few improbable apples - he could have sworn they weren't in season, and they certainly didn't appear to be the withered remains from last year. Besides the apples, nothing fancy; not that he was overly fond of the fussy Orlesian breakfast that dragged out for courses, or even for the hearty Fereldan fare. He still couldn't swear that he was hungry, but, at least this was more appealing than most.

He was also more than capable of counting and weighing exactly how much she'd brought. "Have you eaten yourself?" he asked politely.

She smiled at him, not quite pleasure, but the happiness of a teacher who's pupil had caught onto a lesson. "Not between the slamming doors," she said, almost lightly enough for it to not be the censure that ran under the words. 

_Not my fault this time_ , he thought grimly, but had the sense to keep his mouth shut about that particular part. "Then would you care to join me, and let me make up for the poor manners of the morning?" he asked, and put all the warmth and charm into his voice that he had spent four hundred years using to save his skin; every so often, even he recognized that he couldn't fight a Matron Mother, and had to use charm to get what he wanted from her instead. It had always left bile in his mouth even before sex had come into play, and he hated so much as thinking of the metaphor now. If only it wasn't so very apt.

"I'd be delighted," she said. He started to set the basket down and offer a hand to ease her down as well, but she cut him off with a very literal wave of her hand, a gesture that was too sharp for what he thought her tone had indicated. Beneath the glove, the Anchor flared with pain that nearly had him dropping the basket, and he saw the sparks dance through the air. 

Mage. He kept forgetting that she had been studying magic, as well as apparently being a priestess. He kept forgetting that mages here didn't need to hide what they were and what they could do. And that they had a far more flexible idea of what they could do, though he wasn't sure if that was the nature of magic on Faerun, or that they simply didn't have to work within Circle and under Chantry oversight.

Catti swept her hand through the air again, gentler, as if trailing her fingers over a bench, and the sparks followed the gesture and settled into place like the sweep of a gown’s train, until he could make out the shape of a low seat out of the corner of his eye. "This is much more comfortable in these days," she said, smiling at him. He very much wanted to be imagining the smugness in her expression as she delicately settled herself on the invisible bench she'd created, delicately laying a hand over her belly. 

Because it was expected, because he _still_ was not a child to sit at her feet, he eased down next to her, with only a single deep breath of hope that it would hold them both. "Speak for yourself," he couldn't help but mutter, because even when he was being charming to Matron Mothers he couldn't quite hold his tongue. And really, the bench was hard against his hip and the Anchor was busy complaining about being far too close to magic that was foreign to what it was.

But she laughed, and he tried to set it aside as he set the basket next to him, tried not to be too obvious that he'd set it between them, sweeping the covering back so that she could pick what she liked. For himself, he fished one of the eggs out of the jar; he hadn't seen chickens running around, but they were far enough from the village to make fresh eggs part of weekly marketing instead of a daily constant. Then he bit into it, and the taste wasn't just bland, it was _flat_. 

Magic. She'd created this by waving her hands in the air and casting a spell. It hadn’t come from her kitchen, her supplies, her will and skill; she hadn’t considered how long it would be before something was in season, or even how long it took to boil an egg. She had simply cast a spell and packaged up the results in a pretty basket and tracked him down. She’d probably used a spell for that, too. He swallowed the egg past the lump in his throat, tried to swallow down the emotion as well as he looked back out to the river. 

She let him have a moment to brood in quiet, he would give her that. Then she very delicately bit into a slice of toast, the crunch far louder than the soothing rush of water. When he looked over, she smiled again. “This must be so very different for you,” she said, gesturing to their surroundings.

Because it was there, because his body needed fuel if he meant to survive to go home, he reached into the basket and picked out an apple. Even the _skin_ didn’t feel right against his teeth, too taut, someone’s idea of what an apple should be; the scent was brief, gone in an exhale, and wasn’t nearly enough to give it flavor. “You might be surprised,” he muttered.

"I suppose," she said with a tittering little laugh, gesturing with her triangle of toast towards the river. "It just seems so hard to think of a river underground.”

 _Ah_. She meant it was supposed to be strange to him because of the Underdark, because this was the first time they thought he'd seen a forest, seen a river with water so clear he could see it rushing over the rocks in its bed.

Zak took another bite of his apple, considering the sweep of the river in front of them. If there was no point in pretending to be startled by any of this, perhaps there was also no point in at least trying to explain where he'd been, what he'd seen. Oh, the whole _Herald of Andraste_ and _Lord Inquisitor_ parts were far too complicated to get into - the Dalish clan Lavellan was probably too complicated to get into - but what was the harm in telling her he'd been running around on the surface before, even if that wasn't _this_ surface?

Swallowing his bite, he began: "In fact-"

"I know they exist," Catti interrupted, shaking her head. And for just a moment, her smile pulled, a veil falling over her eyes, darkening them and tightening her expression. "I saw the river that runs through to the lake of Menzoberranzan," she said, so quietly he had trouble hearing, even with his hearing and seated right next to her. 

Thedas could wait. "You were in the Underdark?" he had to ask. 

She nodded, not quite looking at him and not quite looking at the river, but somewhere between her hands and the bank of it. "Yes," she said. "Though it was long ago - another lifetime, really." She tipped a glance over towards him, and her smile was just a little sad as well as being bleak, struggling for lightness over something that couldn't be. "I understand that part of it too," she added. "What it's like to come back, and everything's different." 

For just a moment, she looked equal parts as young as her years suggested she should be, and as old as her life had actually extended, too fragile and tired. For just a moment, he liked her far better than he had. "And you're different than you were before," he agreed quietly. 

And just like that, it was gone, her eyes bright again, the fragility neatly tucked away. "And for the better," she said cheerfully. 

Was there a strained note in her voice? Or was he only imagining that perhaps this was a mask as much as anything an Orlesian courtier wore? "Do you ever miss it?" he asked.

She gave him a curious look, almost skeptical and wary, and perhaps he'd pushed a little too hard with the question. But then her eyebrows drew together thoughtfully. "Sometimes," she finally said. "I don't think I'd be human if I said I didn't miss the good memories I have of that time. I just know I'll not be reliving them - and there's some I certainly don't wish to!" His ears nearly pricked up as she laughed, voice roughening with an accent that reminded him of Knight-Captain Rylen, all broad vowels at odd with the crisp words before. The dwarves here had spoken that way, he vaguely remembered. 

Perhaps the accent urged her to further honesty, because she looked away from him, but as if she saw something in the distance. Or the past. "There are times I miss Icewind Dale, even now." 

"Is that where you grew up?" he asked, something a little less than an outright guess. 

She almost started, as if she'd forgotten he was next to her just as thoroughly as she'd forgotten her toast. "Yes - and where Drizzt lived for a long time," she added, just a little bit of a prod in the words. 

If she meant him to ask, he'd oblige her. Tossing the apple core across the river, where it might plant itself and grow another apple tree - if magical apples could - he glanced over at her and managed a smile with the question. "Will you tell me about it, then?" 

But this time, she greeted his understanding of the leading question with a smaller smile, almost shy and pleased. "Be a pleasure," she said, and her eyes were bright enough it seemed they were still being honest. "Times are I think I miss the mountains the most..." she began.

She said the words, and Skyhold reared up in his mind, the glory of the castle nestled deep in the Frostbacks. Josephine had sighed over its location, and they all had suffered over the difficulty of keeping it supplied at the first, but he and Cullen had been appreciative of its defensive position, just as Leliana had approved of how it was midway between the most dangerous of enemies.

But all strategic considerations faded next to just how Maker-blessed _beautiful_ it was when the rising sun turned the battlements of the walls into gold. 

And she was not speaking of Skyhold. With an effort, Zak corralled his wandering attention, and listened; not terribly far underneath, guilt pricked at him for reasons that were only slightly related to being distracted by a single word. She was telling him where she was from, and he was letting her assume she knew where he was; they had very good reason to think they were right, to not need to bother asking him.

 _Except I was dead_. The thought was still uncomfortable even for him, something that remained a black space in his memories even after he'd regained the ones from Faerun and Menzoberranzan, and part of him shied away from ever knowing what had happened after he'd ended the miserable undeath after his first death. It hadn't mattered, when he had so very much to live for - then and now. 

And yet shouldn't _someone_ be wondering just where he'd been, how it was he was able to be dragged back to life, willing or not?

He tried to put that worry aside as well, tried to pay attention as she told him of the ten towns surrounding the three lakes, of the vast tundra beyond that where monsters roved, both natural predators and those animals that knew they had to fight everything to survive that wilderness. And if he could almost smell the icy air, that wasn't a detail she needed to know. But nor could he keep his tongue from slipping entirely: "It sounds something like home," he said idly as she finished a tale of her father and Drizzt fighting a yeti together. 

She not only fell silent, she went utterly still, a little of the light fading from her eyes as she studied him. "I suppose I never considered it that way," she finally said. "It does have danger 'round most corners like the Underdark, you're right on that at least. I expect that might be why Drizzt was as comfortable as he was there." 

Oh, _Andraste's tits_ , either he had to remember not to comment about such things, or had to tell them outright. He wasn't quite sure which he was going to say when he opened his mouth: "I didn't mean - "

"Of course not," she said briskly, and reached over to start packing up the basket. "And it's not a bad thing to see it's similar, truly." Her voice had lost the soft little burr, gone crisp around the edges again, made her sound more like Vivienne than Rylen, just that little brittle note that meant she'd picked up a mask, if not a shield. "It's all you know, and it's natural to make the connections with what you already know.”

"Are you trying to convince me, or yourself?" he had to ask, his own voice sharpening in spite of himself. But...damnit, he hadn't been thinking of the Underdark at all, never tried to think of the Underdark if he could at all help it. That bit of indignation was on him, but more, she hadn't even given him a chance to explain - again. She'd made her assumptions and was so sure she was right she didn't leave room for contradiction.

He regretted his tone, his hasty words, when she looked up at him with wide eyes, and it was her turn to draw back a little too noticeably from him, tucking the basket closer to her. "I suppose it doesn't really matter, does it?" she asked rhetorically. "Come on," she said, flashing a smile at him that didn't light her eyes as she stood. "I've the breakfast things to put away, and then some work in the garden." 

There was nothing for it but to stand with her, no matter he had wanted to sit a few moments more and have the river for company. But he might not have proper drow manners anymore - he'd never had proper drow manners - but he knew to stand and escort a female where she wanted to go; that much was even the same in Orlesian etiquette, and while he _very much_ didn't have proper Orlesian etiquette, Josie and Leliana and Vivienne had at least tried to teach him much of it before that disastrous ball, and he paid attention when those three spoke. 

He still cast one last wistful glance back towards the river as they headed back towards the cabin; at least he knew the path, and knew he could slip away and return later, but that was poor comfort when the noise retreated again, and he was left with the chattering birds, and the false-laughter from Catti-brie. 


	8. Now: Above Skyhold

“—coming around now.”

Zak blinked, and instead of black, the world around him was white. Something sharp-smelling and bitter filled his nose and mouth, a thickness on his tongue: someone had poured another potion down his throat, and from the taste, one with more than the normal amount of deep mushrooms.

He blinked again, and the whiteness was cut with shadows, then with colors, and finally shapes he could recognize swam into view: Varric, a warm and steady bulwark against his side, a bracing hand on his shoulder, and the depressingly-familiar craggy face of Adan shoved close enough he could see his bright blue eyes under the thick black eyebrows.

“Good,” Adan said with a grunt, standing. “Welcome back, Your Worship,” he said with what was for him civil respect. “Stop doing so on a stretcher.” 

He ached, but the pain in his shoulders had receded to a dull, steady throb, like bruises instead of cuts. A glance down at his left hand showed that it had been bandaged, mitten-like, and the Anchor didn’t hurt so much, as if the bandages muffled it. His knees were still cold, and this time when wind cut through the valley, it went straight through his damp clothes and made him shiver. And then he couldn’t stop shivering. Varric’s hand on his shoulder the only part that was warm, almost pain. 

But he was alive. 

“Drizzt,” he managed, though what Varric and Adan heard through his chattering teeth, he didn’t care. He struggled up to his feet, and if his head swam, at least he was able to stand, able to stagger the step or two towards the other side of the boulder. It was easier than it had been, a deep path trodden in the snow all around the boulder from the infantry.

He only needed those few steps, a glance, to see that his son was gone. “Where?” was all he could manage, teeth still chattering; he couldn’t manage anything like the Drow Hand Code, but could point at the place, the wet hollow in the snow where Drizzt’s body had been, an icy fist around his heart that had nothing to do with his own pain.

“The other elf that looks suspiciously like you?” Varric said, taking his elbow again, something between comfort, keeping him upright, and restraining him from running off into the snow. “He’s over here with the rest of the wounded.” He tugged, and Zak followed it, looked towards the sheltering side of the nearer mountain. 

Cassandra stood in the center of a knot of soldiers, giving orders; others busily moved around her, clearing a shallow dish in the snow, the bones of a fire in the center. The half-dozen wounded ranged in a long arc curving around the firepit, some unconscious or heavily dosed, others able to sit upright and keep pressure on their wounds. Around them, moving carefully between bodies, more soldiers staked down short poles, a pile of canvas at their feet; it looked like a scout’s lean-to, and he presumed it and much of the rest of the supplies had come from Scout Harding’s pack. A glance showed that she and a handful of soldiers were halfway up the pass. He presumed they were heading back to Skyhold for more supplies; even if they wouldn’t be here overnight, they’d need them to transport the wounded and the dead. 

Marking how far she was, and how far along the lean-to was, he was mildly relieved to figure that he hadn’t been unconscious for long. 

But mostly, he caught sight of a familiar form at the end of the line of the injured, and wrenched himself free of Varric’s hand and Adan’s watchful gaze. He lunged for Drizzt, stumbling through the snow but didn’t quite fall as he dropped to his side and took stock. There was a blanket under him, the edges tucked around him as far as they’d reach; his eyes were still closed, lips parted, and with the noise of the Inquisition setting camp around him, he couldn’t hear his breath. But he was here with the wounded, not shrouded with the dead, and someone - likely Adan - had bandaged his leg, his hands, even his eartips. 

“His wounds,” he said, lifting his eyes back up to find Adan standing at his shoulder, Varric trailing not far behind him and trying not to look too interested. “There’s poison,” he managed.

“There’s something,” Adan said caustically. “Bleeding’s stopped now I’ve got potions on it, and he’s breathing and his heart’s beating. More than that, I need more supplies than I grabbed on my way out of Skyhold. There’s other wounded.” And with that, he simply walked away to the next.

Warmth settled over his shoulders, and he reached for the edge of the wool blanket, tugging it closer around him, without taking his eyes from Drizzt. Wet as he was, it didn’t help much, but at least it was a little warmth. “Not much more we can do, Blades,” Varric said, circling around to address him properly, and while he apparently had the sense not to sit in the snow, he did hunker down on his haunches next to him. “Not here, anyways, and you’ve seen Adan heal worse.”

The words were meant to be comforting, he knew. They weren’t. 

“He’s my son,” he said, quick and curt to keep it from hurting too much. 

“He’s your…” Zak could almost hear Varric blink, feel the dwarf rock back in confusion. “Well. Shit.” 

Somehow, that seemed to cover so many things, and Zak laughed bitterly - it turned into a cough, one he buried in his hands. “Yes,” he agreed. 

“It sounds a story and a half,” Varric added, and if it was a nudging hint, at least it was a subtle one. 

Zak shook his head. In front of him, the soldier crouched by the pile of kindling finally got it to catch, and if the little flame was tiny, he was cold enough he could feel its warmth even from here. It was enough. He shrugged off the blanket, faintly warmed with his own heat, and gently lay it over Drizzt. He didn’t even move, and Zak tried very hard not to worry more. “Another day,” he said, and wasn’t sure if he shivered from the cold or from the fact he was sitting by his unconscious son. 

Or from the attention. He could almost feel the eyes of the Inquisition soldiers on him, both those busy with some other task and those who were wounded: no direct staring, but the surreptitious glances out of the corners of their eyes had nearly as heavy a weight to them. Maybe more, when paired with the whispers that raced around camp, everyone too busy to gossip but managing to do so anyways. When there was one word on all of their lips: _Inquisitor_. 

He didn’t blame them, exactly: he’d vanished under mysterious circumstances and reappeared three months later under dangerous ones. But while there was no way to hide who he was - there were no other drow on Thedas, had never been drow, and if he thought that a mercy it did mean that he stood out - he also didn’t draw attention to himself.

He could have, _should_ have, taken charge of the camp, gotten Cassandra’s report on what was being done and when they could expect the rest of the Inquisition’s response.

He didn’t. He stayed at Drizzt’s side and mercilessly used Varric as a shield against his own Inquisition.

Varric didn’t seem to mind keeping vigil with him, chatting with casual familiarity about the comings and goings in the time he’d been away; Zak was fairly sure Varric didn’t expect him to actually listen. And Cassandra only cast considering gazes towards him, a frown tugging at her mouth; but, she didn’t do what she’d done in the early days of the Inquisition and dragged him into the spotlight. And that too seemed a kindness, and one he was not meant to acknowledge any more than Varric’s recounting of the ongoing chess tourney and how apparently no one had learned anything from Wicked Grace nights and let Josephine set the betting. 

“Did Cullen end up naked again?” he asked, because some half-frozen part of him had been listening after all.

“Curly apparently learned not to bet against an Antivan,” Varric gleefully reported. “He let that honor pass to Dorian, who was much less unhappy about it. I still think he threw the match against Bull.” 

“Dorian’s not nearly as good as he likes to pretend,” Zak said, and if his skin was cold, the tug towards that particular pairing was warmer than the fire. He considered, unable to keep from imagining the tactics, the players, and added, “Solas’s better, though.” He, Cullen, and Solas routinely battled for the top spot in the endless rounds of chess they played during the winter months - and passed the victory among each other, too. 

Home. The thought struck him with the warmth of the fire, the weight of the blanket on his shoulders. He was home, and would see Dorian and Iron Bull and Solas and Cullen again - and likely before the day was out. He was home, and there would be more games of chess when all of Skyhold was covered in snow and ice and they’d settled in for the winter. He was home, and would look down over the great keep from his balcony at night and feel the nightmares recede because the stars were bright overhead and the walls were well-patrolled around him. 

Zak closed his eyes, imagining, remembering, and had half a mind to struggle to his feet and stagger up the pass, walk home himself. 

Another horn call had him lifting his head as it cut through the memories; the notes of it brought up still more. It was high and brassy, metal rather than cow horn, and the call didn’t echo or fill the valley the way Harding’s had. 

The heavy infantry themselves did that, shouting as they reached the top of the pass, a long black line of soldiers; even the heads of the wounded lifted, and the skirmishers working on the lean-to waved in encouragement. The infantry didn’t keep the neat line as the descended into the pass, not once they saw the snow and that they wouldn’t be fighting demons all the way down, but even on foot, armored, and breaking paths through the snow, they made good time. It seemed mere minutes before their commander broke away from the main line, wading through the blood-streaked snow to Cassandra, saluting as he did. With the helm, he couldn’t recognize him, not at this distance, but he did recognize the requisitions and supply soldiers who didn’t bother waiting for their commander to pass along orders, just strode up to the skirmishers, dropped the packs from their backs, and started handing out supplies.

“We’re not getting the supply wagons over the pass,” one of them commented to Varric as she laid another blanket over Zak's shoulders. “They sent back to the stables for pack animals, but we figured, well, what we can carry will be more than what you lot had with you when you went tearing off after the Fade Rift.” 

“Apparently,” Varric said, a sidelong look that caught Zak’s eye and was neatly a point, “it was just as well we did.”

He felt the moment the soldier recognized him, that fission of shock that almost had her saluting in reflex. He lowered his eyes, looked to Drizzt, refused to acknowledge any of it happening around him. She cleared her throat, then turned and stomped back through the snow for another pack - but the news still rippled out from her, tipped heads and a rustle of murmuring that led to gazes turned in his direction and suddenly brisker movements. 

He didn’t care, except for how it helped. With the dry fuel carried up from Skyhold by many willing backs, the fire grew stronger and warmer. He was more than half tempted to drop his second blanket atop Drizzt, too, but the selfish part of him wanted to stay warm. He also thought that if he did, either Varric would dump it back on his shoulders, or Cassandra would. 

So he sat in the snow, blanket over his shoulders, and watched as the infantry fanned out over the valley, poking through the places where the demons had been slain and the Fade Rift had been; with luck they wouldn’t turn up something that they’d all regret. More of them headed down the pass to take up a watchful guard; even though he hadn’t seen bandits or Avvar didn’t mean they didn’t exist, and there was always wolves and bears to worry about.

No matter he approved of the tactics, he had absolutely no desire to join them.

Drizzt hadn’t woken. Not for the infantry horn, not for the fire. He was breathing, but Zak had to watch closely for those breaths, that proof that he was still alive and hadn’t made the tally of dead _four_.

Faerun, that life Drizzt had carved out for himself, wasn’t his home, wasn’t even comfortable around his skin. But that didn’t seem to matter right now. Home was here, and home somehow was centered on his son, even if there were times he wanted to shake him, to tell him to close his mouth and listen before he judged. 

He wanted to fight his son over so many points. But he wanted him to live not so that he could win an argument, but because of the deep wrenching he’d felt around his heart when he’d seen his son for the first time on the surface, not quite hope and not quite joy and only love. 

This was why people prayed to gods. He knew gods from across two different worlds and of so many different people: from Menzoberranzan to the surface gods of Faerun to the gods of the Dalish to the Maker and Andraste. And any words he might say died on his tongue, left it full of dust. But then, he was no cleric, not even a healer, and if he’d been called the Herald of Andraste that didn’t mean she listened to him. And why should any of the gods listen to his prayers, with who he was and what he’d done?

But maybe for his son, so much better than he was, maybe if he knew the sacrifices to make…

“Zak,” Cassandra said, and he lifted his head to find her and Varric studying him with varying degrees of worry in their eyes. “They’re bringing up stretchers to take people over the pass; there’s wagons waiting where the snow stops to take them the rest of the way to Skyhold.” 

He nodded, looking back down at Drizzt. “Good,” he said softly. “If this is the pass I think, it’s not far.” He glanced up, surveyed the infantry soldiers with new eyes, judging just how fresh they were. “And there’s hands enough to make it fast.” Perhaps even smooth, though in these conditions he really doubted it. _Fast_ would have to be enough; he wanted his son comfortable, but he wanted him in the hands of the surgeons still more.

“Yes,” she agreed. “You should be back to Skyhold within the hour.” 

Varric hissed through his teeth, and it took Zak a moment to realize why, for the implication to work through his ice-numbed mind. And it made him lift his his head and glare up at her. “No,” he said. “I’m going on my own feet, with him,” he added, nodding to Drizzt, who certainly was going to be carried on a stretcher.

“I doubt you can walk, much less over three miles,” Cassandra said, biting logic. 

He probably couldn’t, but he didn’t care. The image flooded his mind, of being carried home to Skyhold, of seeing the walls rise above him from flat on his back. A spark of indignation as well as temper lodged under his heart, one that was nearly as good as anger for keeping him on his feet. “Then bring a mount,” he said. “With a whole damned stable to choose from,” he added sharply, “one of them should be able to keep their footing in the snow.” Because no, he was not going to be able to walk up that pass. But that was no reason to end up on a stretcher being carried by his people.

He’d tolerated it once, after Haven, and he’d had a broken arm and considerably worse frostbite than this. He wouldn’t tolerate it now. Not to come home. 

“You’ll hurt yourself worse trying to ride,” Cassandra snapped.

Varric cleared his throat before either she could continue on, or those sparks in him turned into fury and he said something he would very much regret when he was warm and dry and in front of his own hearth. “Seeker, I don’t suppose you’d care to consider how well you’d take being treated like an invalid in front of all the rest of the Seekers and Templars.”

“That’s not the point,” she said, but at least now she rounded on Varric, which wasn’t entirely without precedent. “And I would follow orders if I was an invalid,” she added insistently. They all knew that, given she was the one who punched a tree while she had hay fever, she was lying. They also all knew she was doing it to make a point.

“Maybe,” Varric said, “but pride’s a funny thing. It can’t bleed, but it can still leave deeper wounds than any knife.”

Cassandra scoffed. “Enough of your word-play,” she growled. But she also studied Zak, long and hard, and her eyes finally tracked down to Drizzt, and something in her expression softened.

In all this, she’d asked no questions and certainly hadn’t pestered him for answers. Whatever gossip raced around his reappearance with another male who looked like him, only Varric knew their relationship: he would have heard the dull roar if anyone had overheard that part. She couldn’t know why, but she certainly saw where he was right now. “I trust you will want to stay close to him,” she said grudgingly. “It means you would be moving slow - at a very sedate walk.”

It was a warning as well as an assumption, and hearing the concession in it, he grinned up at her. “We’ll let old grannies pass us on the way,” he promised. “I’ve lost track,” he had to ask Varric, “do we have any old grannies in the Inquisition?”

“Who do you think knits your socks?”

Cassandra rolled her eyes, muttered, “There are no old grannies in Skyhold.” But Zak thought he caught a hint of a smile on her mouth. Part of him understood: this felt very much like old times, from him being knocked flat over closing a Fade Rift to banter between the three of them in particular.

Opinion registered on the matter, she grabbed the nearest requisition officer. Her voice carried, and Zak suspected she’d meant it to: “Fetch a horse for the Inquisitor.” 

The camp went momentarily quiet around him at that confirmation; perhaps it was no more than a formality, but as Inquisitor he’d learned that formalities had weight and power, and couldn’t be ignored the way an _understanding_ could. He didn’t stand, but as the soldiers inclined their heads when he met their eyes, the weight of responsibility settled over his shoulders like another blanket, not quite warm but familiar enough to be comfortable anyways.

This was his home, and these were his people. He wasn’t up to commanding yet, but that didn’t change any of those facts, didn’t change what he was.

The scout who’d been dispatched to the stables returned speedily, leading a very familiar form. Zak shook his head as he reached out and took Varric’s hand to get to his feet; he tried not to lean on him, even if the dwarf was solid as the boulder at his side, tried not to limp as he headed over to meet the inevitable mount.

They’d had a herd to choose from, but of course they’d thought the only suitable one was the Orlesian charger, Empress Celene’s gift for saving her life and keeping her on her pretty gold throne: Fidélité. Even without the armor and barding, the black stallion was the most impressive horse in the stables. But, he realized as the stallion plunged into the snow and surged forward down the pass, they hadn’t chosen him because there was a crowd to be awed: big and heavy as he was, he easily broke the path through the snow to him.

Zak didn’t do quite as well walking to meet the horse, feeling a lane opening up in front of him as soldiers stepped to the side, but that didn’t make the snow any less deep and heavy against him. As he drew close enough, the scout saluted, pressing fist to heart, her other hand tight on Fidélité’s bridle. “Ser,” she said, pride ringing in her voice.

Another time, it probably would have been something like a comfort, something that he could have felt the honor in being acknowledged on his own merits, and not just because he was in command. Instead, his entire attention was fixed on the saddle; it seemed to be entirely higher than he remembered. The scout started to reach for the stirrup, but he set his hand on the pommel of the saddle and lifted his foot up into it before she could get there; no matter how tired he was, he was no petty lordling who needed to have his stirrup held while he mounted.

He probably should have, but pride was something that had kept him on his feet before, and this time, helped him up onto the back of his horse. He silently blessed all of Fidélité’s fancy training when the stallion stood like a rock even as he made a mess of mounting, little more than dragging himself up onto his back, using mane and pommel to push himself up from his belly to at least sit in the saddle, fumble on the other side to slide his foot into the stirrup. 

But then he could almost breathe easier, even if the parts of him that didn’t ache were cold, even if there was a tightness over his shoulders that made him think that he’d just undone all the work the healing potions had done and ripped open those wounds. But the perspective of the camp was different from the back of a horse, familiar from many long months as a Dalish hunter and as the Inquisitor, and so much closer to the top of the pass. 

He nudged Fidélité, and the stallion delicately stepped through the snow, as poised as if on parade in front of the flower of Orlais’s chevaliers, curving around so that he could watch the soldiers lay out stretchers next to each of the wounded. In at least one instance, there was a heated discussion taking place over whether or not the wounded man could in fact walk up the rest of the way to the pass. 

He ignored it, in favor of watching two of the infantry, burly and fresh, slip hands under Drizzt’s shoulders and thighs, and with a minimum of fuss - or movement at all - shifted him onto the stretcher. He’d hate it, Zak knew that in his very bones, would have hated it in a way even he didn’t. Maybe it was for the best there was no other way, if they didn’t have to take the time to explain to him why he wasn’t going to win the argument the wounded soldier next to him was valiantly making, in vain.

He told himself that, and his gut and heart still clenched at the sight of Drizzt’s hand dangling off the side of the stretcher as the soldiers lifted him. 

Under his watchful eye, two more soldiers joined the pair at the stretcher; they each grabbed a side, and properly balanced, the four of them started the long walk up the pass without waiting for the rest of the wounded. If it had been discussed, he hadn’t been part of it; he rather thought it hadn’t, that everything had been communicated with a few short words and even shorter orders and a simple understanding.

He might not always like the deference to his rank, might find it heavier than the blanket that lay over his shoulders, but right now he was willing to take every benefit with both hands, as long as it got Drizzt to the surgery faster, got him warm and safe behind Skyhold’s walls and under Adan’s watchful eye, only a stone’s-throw from the tower of mages and the wildly exotic plants of the inner courtyard garden. 

Or perhaps it wasn’t because of that. Perhaps it was just the Inquisition recruiting and training sharply capable soldiers who recognized which wounds were most critical, and did what had to be done.

“Well, then,” Varric said, and he was loath to look away, look down to where Varric had taken the scout’s place at Fidélité’s shoulder. “Let’s get you home.”

Zak nodded, and gathered up the reins in his hands, feeling Fidélité’s muscles tighten under him, his own way of coming to attention. “I wish it was under better circumstances,” he said, and nudged Fidélité again, turning his head towards the stretcher. Ears pricked, the stallion stepped forward, and Zak let him pick his own path, so long as it was in the same general direction as he wanted him to go.

It was, indeed, a very sedate walk, one that Varric didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping pace with, at least not here. “I think it says something mildly depressing that this is about normal for us,” Varric commented. 

Zak had to smile, even if that part hurt, too. “Usually,” he said, eyes still on the stretcher as they drew close enough for him to turn Fidélité again, this time to parallel its course, “I’m at least bringing back a victory.” He realized how that sounded, when it was his son he was bringing back, and looked away, unable to deny that it was true. 

“Between you and Hawke,” Varric said dryly, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this, there’s all kinds of victories. And,” he added, nodding to the stretcher as well, “nothing’s ended until everyone’s dead and we’re counting the bodies.” 

Zak was quiet the rest of the way up the pass, half because Fidélité needed at last some of his attention to climb an albeit graceful incline covered in snow, and half because he really hoped Varric wasn’t wrong. He’d gone to Faerun more-or-less willingly - somewhat less when he’d learned there wasn’t an easy way back that didn’t lay through that damned drow female, but still, he’d gone because he’d needed to see that his son was alive; he’d hardly dare believe that Drizzt might even be happy.

He’d been drawn by the connection strung between the two of them, something both more and less than blood. That bond had sometimes been all he’d had, the proof that not everything in his life was evil. 

All that was still true. He still loved his son, still remembered far happier days with him, no matter that it seemed Drizzt didn’t. More than once on Faerun, he’d bitterly thought that his son had turned his back on everything from the Underdark, including him. That thought, and Drizzt’s own words - vocal and the louder body language - had battered him. More, they had made it so very clear that he was pushing Zak away, that the bond between them meant nothing to him.

But he was still alive.

And as long as his son was alive, they still might find their way back to what they had been. 

No. As they reached the top of the rise, Zak dropped his head, and admitted to himself that he didn’t want to go back to how they were in the Underdark. Not when that had meant that however much he’d loved his son, he hadn’t trusted him, hadn’t known where his heart lay. Not when his own heart had been more than a little twisted and wounded from everything he had done and failed to do, when he hadn’t been a weaponmaster so much as a drow killer, and proud of that.

He didn’t want to go back to what he’d been, what he’d had with Drizzt. He wanted _better_.

Because he was more than what he had been, and the little he’d seen - that Drizzt had let him see - of his son’s inner life, Drizzt was, too.

That wasn’t a bad thing, even if he was fairly sure Drizzt didn’t realize that he might not have found his way to Faerun’s surface during his life there, but he too had outgrown the cold caverns in the Underdark.

The Dalish had led him there, until he fit under the sky. But Skyhold had done even more, had made him realize that not all his skills were dark, not all his dreams were bad when he could dream of what that half-ruined castle could become, and had put his will into making it a reality. 

He looked up, and he’d been right: this was the glacier he could see from his own balcony. 

“I expect that’s something of a sight for sore eyes,” Varric said quietly at his side.

He couldn’t speak, could only nod agreement, his throat uncomfortably tight as he looked down at it. The gray stone walls rose up from the mountain spire like an extension of rocky outcropping; someone who didn’t expect to find it here might just see another part of the mountain, even its towers nothing more than stone peaks.

But he knew what he was looking at, and like a mirage, it shimmered under his eyes into the familiar: the great curve of the main building, the steep-piked roof of the great hall, the tower of the library and the rookery, the tower of the main gate where Cullen kept his office, the long, narrow causeway stretching from the main gate to the outer buildings, the stables clustered at the foot of the mountain so Dennet had pasture enough to keep the horses and harts and dracolisks separate. 

Even from here, he could just see the balcony of his quarters, where he’d stood on so many nights and gazed up at the stars over the mountains, no more than a delicate white line on a toy-sized castle.

Skyhold. It looked more beautiful now than it had when Solas had first lead them to it, wearing and foot-sore and heartsick after Haven. 

And he wanted to run his hands over every inch of it, especially all the places he couldn’t see from here. 

More, he looked at Skyhold, and thought about Faerun, thought about Drizzt showing him the hunting cabin, and the home he’d built with his wife. And regardless what Drizzt felt towards him just now, he wanted to show Drizzt the armory, the inner courtyard, the great library in the tower and the secret library in the foundation of the castle, places that he especially loved, and thought Drizzt would too.

Show him the place that had become his home.

The idea that he might not be able to was as great a weight of sadness as the idea that Drizzt might not accept it, even if he healed well and clean and could walk again in a day. 

But that was nothing he could do now, and somehow that was even worse. He looked over at the stretcher-bearers, who had the good sense to keep moving down the other side of the pass to where wagons already waited, and nudged Fidélité after them. 

Going down was almost as bad as going up; there hadn’t been nearly enough people through to tramp down passes through the snow. At points, where it had drifted too high, he had to take Fidélité ahead and break the path for the stretchers, the stallion snorting and plunging as snow flung up around his pawing hooves. For the life of him Zak couldn’t tell if he was indignant or having a grand time playing at being a colt.

As they stood to the side where the snow finally ebbed, waiting for the stretcher-bearers and Varric to pick their way through the narrow pass, Zak patted his muscular neck, and Fidélité blew a snort, shaking out his mane, sounding quite satisfied with the day’s work.

That was the last of the deep snow; the rest trailed away remarkably quickly, until there wasn’t enough on the ground even to cover Fidélité’s iron shoes. The stallion picked up his hooves, and Zak felt his muscle bunch underneath his seat again, a quivering need to run rippling through him. It meant he needed to give his mount more attention than he liked just now, holding him back and in check, when what he wanted was to supervise the loading of Drizzt’s stretcher into one of the waiting wagons - so perhaps it was just as well.

The driver whistled to the pair of heavy horses hitched to the wagon, and the wagon lurched forward. “Careful-!” he started to say, and bit off the unnecessary command. 

“For a guy who likes sneaking around an enemy’s flank, you’re worse with secrets than the Seeker,” Varric commented at his side.

Zak snorted, looking down at him, though it chewed at him to take his eyes away from the wagon. “It’s not going to stay secret for long,” he pointed out. Not with the color of their skin, the fact they looked remarkably alike. “And maybe if they know who he is…” It was the drow way of doing things, and he hated it, hated that justice and resources were divvied out based on who someone was, what bloodline they acknowledged; he’d tried his best to keep the Inquisition for doing the same in all their dealings across Thedas, and liked to think he’d succeeded. 

But he’d use the full weight of their relationship to save his life. 

“You know, your Inquisitorialness, either way, having their boss hovering over their shoulders isn’t going to make the surgeons stitch any faster,” Varric pointed out.

Zak almost laughed, and nudged Fidélité to follow after the wagon. “Maybe not. But it’ll make me feel better.” And that, too, was true.


	9. Now: Skyhold

It was a long ride, though Zak was aware it only felt that way. The Inquisition had been in this place for three years, and in that time, what had been a game-trail had become a well-worn, carefully-smoothed path leading down from the pass to the valley floor, and then winding its way back up the steeper slope of the mountain spar that held Skyhold. He had ridden out on this path, come home on this path, more times than he cared count, and knew that even with Fidélité trailing the wagon at the promised sedate walk - so slow Varric could keep up on foot - it wouldn’t take them a half-hour to reach the gates of Skyhold.

It just felt like hours, when he both itched to race ahead, gallop straight into Skyhold and rouse the infirmary, and wanted to pace the wagon at its side, as if this was dangerous land that could spawn bandits from the very rock. And when he winced every time the wagon-wheel caught a rut and the entire conveyance bounced, and he had to bite his tongue around orders. But faster would be harder, worse on everyone.

Including him. Walking this path on horseback might be easier on him than walking it on his own two feet, but it still demanded his strength and attention - though less of that then other times, when Fidélité wasn’t being conspicuously on his best behavior. Every step still drained energy from him like blood seeping from a wound; riding took strength to stay upright, to move with Fidélité instead of bouncing up and down. However tempting it was to slouch, to go boneless, he knew that would just hurt them both. Well. More than he already was.

Down from the snowy pass, the air was slightly warmer, but they were still up in the mountains, that just meant he wasn’t _uncontrollably_ shivering under the blanket - a not-quite disreputable yellow plaideweave, he judged with a sliver of spare attention. His shoulders ached, and a sharp line of pain drew down them, the Despair demon’s gift. His back ached, and who knew where that was from. And under the bandages his left hand hurt with a steady throb that at least didn’t increase whenever Fidélité took a step, but he knew that was not a promising sign.

And yet when they reached the little cluster of buildings at Skyhold’s foot - the additional stables and the enterprising inns that had sprung up to host Skyhold’s overflow or less important guests - all he could do was look up at the climb yet to come, and impatience for more than just his son chewed through him.

Whenever and whoever had built it, Skyhold had been designed to be defensible. Its heavily barricaded main gate was guarded first by a long causeway, then by the outer barbican tower with its own set of gates. And to reach the barbican in the first place, the path up the side of the butte was narrow and winding.

The wagon drover waved him over and nodded at the steep incline with a jaded eye. “You’ll not want to be behind us when we go up that,” he said bluntly.

The words were almost enough to make Zak’s hackles bristle, if he had it in him for another fight today, and a fight against one of his own people. He didn’t, not when he was so tired it crowded at the corners of his mind. Not when he knew that the only reason the Inquisition had become what it had was because he had listened to those who knew what they were doing, and kept out of their way to let them do it. “Take it carefully,” he warned.

The drover snorted. “We will, and we’ve done it before - and worse, in Fereldan.” Something entered his dark eyes as he glanced back to Zak and gave a deep nod that was at least half a salute. “But you go up and get them to open the gate for us,” he said.

After spotting the Fade Rift, no matter that the garrison had responded and likely reported back that it was vanquished, it was probably needed. And Zak wasn’t quite so tired to be deaf to the other excellent reason to send him ahead and let Skyhold see him first before the wagons of wounded showed up. “Varric,” he said, glancing down again.

“I hope you’re not going to suggest I have any sort of knowledge of how to drive a wagon up a slope,” he said.

Out of the mists of his mind, Zak had the sudden impression of all the dwarves Drizzt had surrounded himself with - to a dwarf streaked with soot and with a mining or forge-hammer in one hand and a tankard in the other. Looking back down at Varric, somehow tidy and urbane even with his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, he had to smile. “No - but I’d rather someone was here with him.” When he couldn’t be - again.

Something passed over Varric’s expression, an _understanding_ that was nearly crippling, and something else. Something like sorrow, but before Zak could identify it or even wonder why, Varric hid it away, deftly and surely as any drow. “I can’t promise I’ll be much use, but I’ll keep an eye on him,” he promised.

It was more than he could have expected from anyone else - or at least, anyone from Faerun. Zak nodded, and clapped Fidélité on the neck with his good hand as he faced the path up to the barbican and from there, to Skyhold. “Let’s go home, boy,” he murmured. And even under the circumstances, even with the weight that lingered on his shoulders, the tie that snaked out behind him to the wagon, his heart beat a little faster.

Fidélité caught his mood, snorting and tossing his head, ears pricking forward and tail swishing. He fairly sprang off his haunches, direct into a light canter that made Zak swear and grab for the pommel. Steep as it was for a wagon, most horses had the sense to take it at a grim and determined walk. Fidélité apparently had been spending too much time in the hart’s paddock again, or just wanted to reach the nice warm stalls of the inner stable where Horsemaster Dennet and Blackwall were both sure to give him considerable attention.

And Zak could only be grateful as the stallion bounded up the beaten path, barely slowing on the corners, as the barbican tower loomed up higher and higher over his head, until it blotted out the shadows of Skyhold beyond it and his neck ached looking up to try and spot the tower guard. The barbican gates were down, and Fidélité deigned to be reined in, snorting as Zak slowed him to a careful walk. The drover probably meant him to have these gates opened, too, but that would be a moment’s command, and he itched as thoroughly as Fidélité to be within Skyhold - and this tower didn’t count.

There wasn’t much space between the tower and the edge of the butte, but he’d discovered that there was just enough for a horse to pick their way past; a hart was better, of course, but when he kneed Fidélité, the chevalier-trained horse set each hoof carefully as he stepped forward. Looking down at the sheer drop far too close to those hooves made Zak’s head spin; looking up to see if the guards knew who he was or if he was about to get killed in a frankly embarrassing way was only mildly better.

The best that could be said was that it was over soon, and even as he sighed, he felt Fidélité relax as they rounded the corner of the tower, and stepped up onto the long causeway bridging barbican and the castle. It was Skyhold that loomed in front of him now, so large he couldn’t see anything but the wall, the shadow of the tallest towers, and the great arch of the main gate. And through the portcullis, the scraggly trees of the lower courtyard, the last few orange leaves clinging stubbornly to their branches.

His throat was tight again, but perhaps it was understandable. It felt very like seeing his son on Faerun; perhaps Skyhold didn’t - couldn’t - love him back, but it seemed he didn’t require reciprocity to carry the emotion in his heart.

Or perhaps it did.

He kneed Fidélité forward; the destrier’s neck arched as he moved into a trot, hooves lifting neatly, as if enjoying the ringing of his shoes on the broad stone bridge. Zak didn’t; he set his teeth against the bouncing gait, shifted in the saddle to do what he could to ease the sparks of pain with each stride. It was faster than a walk and the bridge was short enough, and that was the best that he could say of it.

Fidélité trotted all the way up to the dropped portcullis, and smartly halted under the shadow of the thick gate, ears flicking back and blowing a snort as if fully expecting it to have opened for them as he approached. But there had been a Fade Rift sighted, and if demons wouldn’t have been much slowed by the stone and iron of the gatehouse, Cullen was too good at his job not to take precautions.

Cullen. The name was a different kind of ache. Zak looked up at the murder holes piercing the expanse of the ceiling; he could almost see through them to the Commander’s office, could almost still see the chess board with their game on it.

And when he looked down, on the other side of the portcullis was a gaping guard: a new recruit, from the way his hand was tight on the spear and eyes wide under the helm. But however new he might be, he was still a soldier of the Inquisition, and knew his commanders. “Lord Inquisitor!” he gasped, then gestured to someone on his side of the gate. “Open the gate for the Herald of Andraste!”

The iron chain of the portcullis groaned, inner gears somewhere in the wall protesting, as the portcullis was ponderously raised. Beyond it, it seemed the entirety of Skyhold gathered in the lower bailey, coming from all directions and straining for a glimpse: stableboys and caravan masters, soldiers and scouts, mages and Templars, servants and courtiers. If those soldiers who’d come to his rescue in the pass had been circumspect, these men and women were not. their whispers raced in a spiral, making the circuit behind the walls like a storm: “Inquisitor”, “Andraste,” “returned”, “alive”.

Right now, he didn’t care if they thought Andraste had a hand in it; he’d never cared who believed what, so long as they’d come to the Inquisition and offered their service. Right now, he didn’t even care that the crowd meant he would have to spend precious time being the Inquisitor, being on display, when he still wanted to go to the infirmary for reasons that had nothing to do with his own wounds.

He loved Skyhold. But he loved the Inquisition more, all these people who looked beyond themselves and fought to make the world better. They owed him fealty, and he owed them loyalty in turn.

The portcullis clunked as it settled into place above him, and he kneed Fidélité forward, carefully hiding his bandaged hand by grasping the blanket closer over his shoulders. The blanket heavy on his shoulders, his back aching, a knot inside him gave way as Fidélité’s hoofbeats dulled as he stepped off stone and onto the packed earth of the bailey, and familiar walls were finally around him.

At least, until those that had gathered to watch his entrance pressed forward, murmuring; hands stretched out, brushed along his boot, his calf, the cantle of the saddle; faces turned up to his, and all of them full of the same naked yearning expression, a mass of the faithful reaching for a holy relic. It wasn’t entirely comfortable; however gentle and brief, the touches carried a weight behind them that lingered long after the hands were removed.

He’d never said he was holy, never said he’d been sent by Andraste; how could he be any judge of it, when the first time he’d encountered the Chant had been through Cullen - not Cassandra, who he may have met first but was so sure in her faith it was more intimidating than her swordplay. This side of having his memories returned, he understood better why he’d been so suspicious of Andraste and the Chant and the Revered Mothers especially. By now, he could at least say he liked the distant singing of the Chant for aesthetic reasons, was even more than passingly fond of Andraste Herself. But he was still well aware that their faith was deeper than his, and they’d fixed it on him, made him a part of it every much as Andraste - but a statue couldn’t falter or doubt, couldn’t worry that his failure would destroy something vital for so many of those who trusted him.

He could worry about sending them to their deaths, and that weight was a familiar one; their gentle hands carried the weight of their souls, and that, he was neither used to nor comfortable bearing on his shoulders, not even after so much time. He couldn’t be.

And whatever he felt, Fidélité liked it considerably less than he did. The stallion balked, neck arching and heavy hooves flashing as he shied. That only put him into the hands on the other side of him; he flinched back, hard enough Zak lost his grip - one-handed, already loose - on the reins. Instinct had him leaning over to retrieve the reins before Fidélité, however well-trained, did something stupid and got himself tangled in them and broke a foreleg.

Too far. He leaned too far, and the world swam around him, the ground spinning away. He groped for Fidélité’s mane for balance, couldn’t seem to find it. His pulse pounded in his ears in a way it hadn’t for long minutes, but now made up for it, drowning out everything around him. Hands still reached for him, not touching a talisman now but settling on his shoulder and back. They thought to help, of course they did, but all those bodies still _pressed_ against him, the scent of wet wool pungent under his nose. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

“Back! Get back!” One voice cut through the babble, and suddenly there was a bubble of space around him and someone’s hand on Fidélité’s bridle, stilling the stallion. He could breathe again, could fight his way back upright; he blinked the world back into focus, and there was Krem at Fidélité’s head, glaring at the crowd. From the tension in his shoulders, and the fact he hadn’t been there two minutes ago, Zak figured he’d shoved through the crowd, using the sharper edges of armor to get to him, and wasn’t afraid to do so again.

The Iron Bull, however, didn’t need to use armor to get the crowd to part. “Hey boss!” he called, very much as if Zak had just been out for a ride before dinner. He also strolled forward as if there wasn’t half of Skyhold’s population between him and Fidélité; and, given that he could just about meet Zak’s eyes with both his feet on the ground, everyone got out of his way, a channel opening up for him.

Just then, Zak could have kissed both men. He patted Fidélité on the neck, murmuring, “Thanks,” to Krem, and braced himself. He’d gotten himself up here by will and grit; he could damn well get himself down on the same. And if he fell flat on his face, well, there were healers around who could deal with that, and just now he didn’t care if it was a blow to his pride. Not so long as he was here now. He slipped his feet from the stirrups, lifted his leg over the horn of the saddle, and slid down.

The ground was harder than he thought, or he was more tired than he thought; he landed on both feet, but heavily, jarring pain rippling up through his knees and spine. He nearly buckled, started to, but a very large, calloused hand caught him by the shoulder, and even made it look like a casual clap of greeting. But then, Bull was far more subtle than most people thought a seven-foot qunari brawler could be; Tal-Vashoth or not, he’d once been a spy, and that was only half the reason Zak liked him as much as he did.

“Shouldn’t you be chasing Venatori out of Orlais?” he asked, voice as muzzy as his head but the landing had rattled the memory free of the last time he’d seen Bull.

“Finished that months ago, boss,” Bull said amiably. “They squabble too much to stay hidden long. Just came back to resupply and pick up the news with the next assignment.” No matter Bull’s casual words, that had still been a considerable hike through the Dales to get back; Zak had to wonder just when Bull’s Chargers had shown up, and how long they’d been hanging around Skyhold. And what they might have been waiting for.

It also hadn’t escaped him that Bull had deliberately positioned himself to shield him from the sight as well as the press of the crowd, give him just this moment of shelter. And if he could think of that, he was about as steady on his feet as he was going to get. Still hiding the bandaged Anchor, he reached up with his right hand and gripped Bull’s bicep - about as close as he could get to his shoulder - and gave a squeeze as he nodded. 

With his horns, Bull really couldn’t nod discreetely, but he had a particular look in his one eye that nearly conveyed the same expression, more serious than most people thought he could be.

Jarlaxle had a look like that. Though Zak had only ever seen it right before Jarlaxle had explained to him why it only made financial and logical sense to slam the knife into his back.

Then Iron Bull stepped to the side, a graceful pivot for all his size, and any thoughts of Faerun were driven from his mind. With that bit of chivvying from Krem, the crowd had formed up into a ragged semi-circle in front of him, too deep and wide for him to see all of them but letting them see him. Anchoring the center was Lysette, brown eyes still grim, a scar down her brow that would always look new to him, as though Haven had been only months ago; like at Haven, her breastplate was polished to a silver gleam so bright the black emblem blazed against it - not just the Templar’s sword, but the Inquisition’s eye overlaying it.

“Inquisitor,” she said, a quiver in her voice. She clasped her fist over her heart, and dropped to a knee, genuflecting.

A ripple went through the crowd, as those behind her dropped to their knees, and before they lowered, he finally recognized faces, and knew the names of some of them: Ser Morris, Sutherland and his entire crew, Elandrin and Adalene. Even Minaeve and Loranil knelt for him, though neither mage nor Dalish elf could normally be considered the faithful or kneeling kind.

Some of his people, particularly those ranging up the stairs and along the ledge of the higher courtyard, he merely recognized without knowing names: the soot-streaked faces of the smiths, the bright red of the mages’ robes, the gleaming masks of Orlesians, all those freeblades who’d come as merchants or mercenaries and stayed as members of the Inquisition. The Orlesian courtiers and diplomats who weren’t an official part of the Inquisition didn’t kneel, but they did sink into graceful _courtesies_ , low as they would for their own Empress Celene.

They weren’t the only ones still standing, and his heart leapt at the sight of the others sticking up amid the crowd: Josephine, brilliant in her gold gown, hand pressed over her mouth; Dorian, not even bothering to look casual, Dagna at his side waving enthusiastically; Sera, sitting and legs dangling comfortably off the ledge midway up to the Great Hall, the place where he’d raised the sword and been first proclaimed the Inquisitor, and if she was eyeing the whole thing skeptically she was also watching.

Movement from the side: Blackwall, gently reaching over to take Fidélité’s reins from Krem. And the other side, half-down the steps from the battlements, Cullen pressed fist to heart and inclined his head, solid in armor and softened with mantle and wind-rumpled curly hair.

The Inquisition knelt for him. But he looked to his Inner Circle, and drew strength from them, solid pillars that had held him up more than once, every inch as important as the walls and towers to make this _Skyhold_. To make this...

He crouched, slowly, his mind spinning, and this time it wasn’t from overbalancing; the whole world pressed against his skin, and this time it lit up every dark and cold place inside him, every place that had been yearning and seeking and remembering all these long months he’d been away.

He closed his eyes, ran his palm over the ground of Skyhold, and finally, _finally_ , he was home.

He stood - perhaps a little hastily, perhaps his heart wasn’t just thundering in his ears from emotion - and reached for Lysette. “Rise,” he told her.

He was in no condition to help anyone to their feet, but as she took the hand he offered, he only felt a brief brush of warmth and calluses, just as her eyes were a brush of softness and wonder as she stood.

“Rise,” he said, and Ser Morris’s brown hand quivered in his, and though that wasn’t unusual, his eyes shone in a way that was.

“Rise,” he said, and Elandrin did so slowly, meeting his eyes with the secret pride that came from knowing what it meant to be alive and whole when you should have been dead long ago.

“Rise,” he said, voice catching as Loranil set a hand in his and stood, and looked about ready to fling his arms around him because neither of them were really proper Dalish, though in so many different ways.

“ _Inquisition_ ,” he said, and somehow, he had the strength to make the word echo off the walls. Behind him, he heard Fidélité’s hooves dance on the stones, and it seemed a ringing bell to punctuate his words. “Rise!”

With a shuffling of many fabrics, the wave rippled in reverse, those kneeling coming to their feet and those bowing straightening. And perhaps they all stood a little taller, heads lifted a little higher. For a moment, he stood before his Inquisition, and had all the strength he could ever ask for; if they had faith in him, then he damn well had faith in _them_.

And he’d seen them move mountains, bring the world obediently to lay down before his boot.

A deep wooden creak behind him broke the moment, like a cold gust off the mountain that went through him and took all that strength and pride with it. “Let’s get back to work,” he said, and even his soft voice echoed, stronger than it had a right to be when emotion pressed up against behind his tongue. “There’s wounded -” he started.

“Including you,” Dorian interrupted. _How…_ Was it worth even asking how Dorian had managed to move through the crowd so fast? Knowing Dorian, it was just as likely he used a spell. What mattered is he was sauntering through the last of the crowd to his side, expertly eying him in a way that had very little to do with attraction. “Or at least, you’re not fit to be helping anyone with anything. Did you go _swimming_ in the snow?”

He had to smile, and not just because Dorian promptly slung an arm over his shoulder, bracketing him with Bull, neatly both trapping and defending him; he couldn’t go and tend to the wounded, but nor could the crowd draw any closer to him. “More or less,” he said, his voice rough with fatigue and emotion.

“And this-” Dorian plucked at the plaideweave blanket and sniffed loudly and dramatically, which, regardless of his specific opinions, was probably the only comment that needed to be made on it. Really, if he ever needed to keep Dorian out of his quarters, all he had to do was redecorate - he didn’t really _want_ to, but it wouldn’t be terribly hard with how many things the Inquisition had been offered as gifts, many of which they hadn’t asked for and still weren’t sure how to actually use…

Woolgathering. Zak blinked, tried to shake himself awake, and just ended up shuddering. Dorian clucked his tongue and tucked him a little closer, and given he was warm and surprisingly firm for a mage, Zak cuddled closer; he’d never gotten an answer if Dorian radiated heat because he had basked so long in the warmth of Tevinter that he carried it inside him even now, or if he simply layered heat spells on every inch of his clothing. (He was betting on the spells.)

“Come on,” Dorian said, and his voice was a little softer, a little gentler, the kindness in him tucked just as closely against his skin as his warmth. “At the very least we’ll get you out of those wet clothes, and if you’re still upright after, you can fling yourself back into work.”

“I need to,” Zak said, looking over his shoulder as the wagon rolled into the lower courtyard, and the Inquisition swarmed it. But if his heart seized and commands bloomed on his tongue to be careful, to be gentle, to get the surgery ready, the part of him that was able to think clearly finally realized he was somehow moving away from it. And if Dorian could steer him through the crowds this effortlessly, he was worse off than he’d thought. 

“We were in the Fade again,” he said, and wasn’t sure if he was admitting or offering a tidbit to get Dorian to let go. He didn’t, and Zak kicked the first stone step leading to the upper courtyard; the sharp pain was momentarily worse than the Anchor and cut through some of the mental haze. 

“We, was it?” Dorian said, and in hindsight, he shouldn’t have given him a puzzle to play with. Or should have given him another magical puzzle to entertain him. “One of these times you’ll drag me along on one of those pleasure-jaunts,” he said, far too cheerfully for anyone contemplating wandering around in the Fade – anyone but a mage. “You owe me for all the snow in the Emprise du Lion.”

Zak snorted, and kept climbing. Lifting each foot felt harder than the entire ride to Skyhold. “You’re not missing much.” Haven, smelling of smoke and bodies; the Despair demons hunting him like a pack of dogs; Drizzt’s body stretched out in a cabin that had probably burned, too; his hands wet with his son’s blood; new and old guilt bitter in his mouth. “A few nightmares, maybe.”

“Yes, well, we do have quite enough of the normal ones.” Dorian snorted again and shifted his arm to steer him over to the left. Training grounds, or Herald’s Rest. He might be able to walk Skyhold’s bounds half-dazed and blindfolded, but it took Zak a moment to decide that Herald’s Rest was the more likely option - and then only because Bull strode ahead, opened the door to the tavern, and ducked inside. In moments, Cabot hurried out to take his other side, and when _he_ actually looked worried, Zak wondered just how bad he looked.

Bad, he decided, when he stepped into Herald’s Rest, and the heat from the massive hearth washed over him; he started shaking, trembling and shivering both. Cabot stepped away, and the space at his side filled with cold air. How could the hearth be so warm and he still be so cold? “Dorian,” he said, and as that was all he could manage through a tight jaw to keep his teeth from chattering, he wasn’t entirely sure what he meant to say.

“I know,” Dorian said quietly, and tugged him back behind the hearth, to the little space where Bull had commandeered his usual table and was sorting through a pile of fabric. “Let’s get you undressed,” he said, taking the blanket from over his shoulders and eyeing him, looking over the various garments from Faerun that at least weren’t all that different from what was normal here. “Usually this part’s much more fun,” he commented, and grabbed the hem of his shirt.

Zak tried to laugh, tried to help him peel off the shirt, and failed at both. Plucking and coaxing the wet wool tunic and the clammy linen shirt beneath it, Dorian peeled them up in one mass, maneuvered it over his head; the best that could be said was he didn’t entirely get in the way. “This is supposed to help?” he demanded as his bare skin tightened, not even the warmth of the hearth reaching him.

“You can’t get warm until you’re dry,” Bull said, deep, rumbling voice annoyingly patient as he came over, bright, striped fabric - it could have been a pair of his trousers - in hand. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter, not when Bull started rubbing him dry, and it _did_ feel better. His touch was too rough to be a caress, and it was better for it that way, letting the strokes just be about the warmth rippling through his skin, no matter it faded back to cold entirely too soon.

He leaned into Bull’s hands, chasing the warmth from Bull’s strokes and what radiated off of him like another hearth. But leaning made him stumble, sway; Dorian caught him, eased him back to his feet, and took the proximity to undo his belt. “This is usually the _very_ fun part,” he said as he loosened the ties at his waist and started rolling down his trousers with very practiced ease.

“Cabot’s got the door barred and Krem’s heading off the curious,” Bull said, catching his eye as he shifted around and started vigorously on his other side. “Figure the Inquisition don’t need to see the little Inquisitor.”

Zak laughed, properly this time, and started coughing - from what, he hadn’t the faintest idea, but deep and wracking coughs that nearly doubled him over. Bull and Dorian both steadied him until it passed, hands bracketing his hips and shoulders. When it passed enough, Dorian bumped against him affectionately. “You have to deal with the boots,” he said as he reached behind him.

Zak started to stoop, felt the world shift, readying to pounce on him, and thought better of it; he braced himself against Bull with one hand, and with the other fumbled with the leather loops and horn toggles keeping the top of the boot close against his calf. He couldn’t get his fingers on his left hand to move delicately enough, not with the bandages, but switching hands was only marginally better; his ice-touched fingers could only manage to free the top two toggles before his head started pounding.

 _Loose_ would have to do. He straightened, just as Dorian dropped a shirt over his head - gods knew whose, because it wasn’t his and it wasn’t Bull’s - not bothering to worry about getting his arms through the sleeves.

And _that_ was warm. He sighed in relief, struggled his arms into the sleeves on reflex, and this time when his legs buckled, Bull just kicked a chair behind him so he dropped into it. Even this side of the open fire, the stones of the hearth carried the heat of the fire, and he finally felt balanced enough, comfortable enough, to toe off both boots, kick off the trousers, and stretch out his legs to plant his toes against the hearth.

Too warm. Not his skin, that was still cold, but his blood was too hot, pounding through his ears, burning high in his cheeks and under his eyes. His black skin didn’t show a flush - Dorian couldn’t know he was _on fire_. He struggled against the fabric, protesting, “I need to—”

Dorian caught his hands when he reached for the shirt to remove it, for anything to cool himself. “That’s normal,” he said gently. “That’s just everything thawing out. It only seems it’s too hot.”

Dorian shifted behind him, and at the brush of a finger along his shoulder, he didn’t feel hot at all, not when the hairs on the nape of his neck stood up in spite of himself. Dorian, Zak reminded himself, closing his eyes and willing himself to trust. Dorian, the Tevinter genius magus. Dorian, who had been with him at more camps than he cared count, almost as many as Harding, often complaining all the way through but solidly at his back when demons rose up in front of them.

And most importantly, Dorian was not a drow.

Though, sometimes he thought like an elf. A puff of breath, warmth tickling across the back of his neck, and Zak had a moment to wonder if Dorian was planning on using magic to dry his hair. And then Dorian set warmed fingertips against his ears, running up the pointed angle, and _blessed Andraste_ it felt good even if the heat _ached_ ; he almost moaned in pleasure and pain, pressed his head back into Dorian’s hands, for a moment not even the Anchor hurting in the face of this.

“Looks like you’ll be keeping these fascinating tips after all,” Dorian said, chuckling, and maddeningly ran warm fingers up and down that angle that had stopped feeling cold because he’d stopped being able to feel it. He could now, and that warmth flooded through him, all the way down his spine. It seemed somehow better even than the shirt, than whatever Bull was draping over his legs that had the weight of wool, but already warmed.

“Feeling better, boss?” Bull asked, and as he didn’t exactly wait for an answer to address Dorian, it was probably rhetorical, or he just didn’t expect anyone to be able to talk while having their ears rubbed by warmed hands. “I’m nipping out to grab some of your stuff for him. Maybe give Cullen an update if he’s doing that pacing and grunting thing again.”

“We’ll somehow manage,” Dorian said before Zak could open his mouth. But as he didn’t stop rubbing at Zak’s ears, he didn’t really care about being usurped.

He sensed Bull ducking away, and nearly smiled. “You know,” he said, hearing his voice as if coming from a long way, “people keep telling me that it must be nice to be the Inquisitor and have my every whim and order obeyed.”

“Does that explain the laughter I hear from the hall at odd hours?” Dorian asked brightly. And, sadly, lifted his hands from his ears; instead, he ran them over Zak’s hair, the tangled length of it. “You usually have this in a braid?” he asked, not waiting for an answer as his fingers sank in and started separating knots, tugging lightly. “At least this isn’t as wet as the rest of you,” he said. The tugs eased, smoothed, Dorian’s fingers tracing down his scalp, parting his hair into three sections. “You’ll tell us what happened?” he asked softly.

Zak hummed agreement, but as that wasn’t a request for _now_ , finally opened his eyes to see just what Bull had put over him. He poked at the pale purple Dales wool. “He considers this better than the plaideweave?” he asked, and his voice carried more of the exhaustion than even his shaking hands.

“I’ve given up on understanding his preferences - for clothes, anyways.” Even without being able to see it, there was a smile in his voice. Tugging, a little more tugging, but moving down, smoothing, and even without being able to see he knew Dorian made quick and neat work of the braid. And he decided he was happier not knowing what Dorian did to secure the tail of the braid, only that he did with a minimum amount of fuss, and that was all that really mattered just now.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d let a male braid his hair and had enjoyed it. Just as he couldn’t remember the last time he’d ever had someone touch his ears gently.

He commanded the Inquisition, and for loyalty and faith, was obeyed. His command of the Inner Circle might be more of a vague concept than a law engraved in stone, but he knew full well that they would do what they thought best, in whatever situation they were placed. And he valued both Inquisition and Inner Circle so much more than he ever had the grudging fealty from House Do’Urden. Almost as much as he’d loved those short years when his son had truly been his, no matter the shadows that surrounded him.

And now his son was somewhere in his castle, and it wasn’t quite the perfect return he’d wanted because it had come with blood on his hands.

He wasn’t shaking from the cold, or from the pain of the Anchor. He looked up, head tipping back, and met Dorian’s eyes. “Hug?” he asked, his voice too fragile, even for something he’d bargained for long ago.

From this angle, Dorian’s smile looked strange, the familiar quirk up from under his mustache somehow sad. “You shameless hedonist,” he teased. But he came around the other side of the chair, stooped a little, and hugged him. And he was _warm_ , so much warmer than even the hearth that Zak knew it wasn’t the circumstances, or spells, or even something innate.

He wrapped his arms around him, leaned his head against his shoulder, and finally, _finally_ felt some of the tension ease inside. Love, he knew, didn’t have to be the kind that circled around sex and attraction to be fierce and strong and, yes, warm. This place had saved him, and much of it through the love he had for his Inner Circle.

And because of that, he smiled against the impractical leather of Dorian’s shirt and murmured: “Takes one to know one.”

Dorian’s arms tightened around him, catching something of his mood and either offering comfort, or needing it himself. As bad as it had been to be trapped in a world not his own, he imagined it had been worse not knowing if he was alive or dead. But Dorian only agreed cheerfully: “Yes, it does.”

“How come I’ve never gotten to hug the boss?” Bull wanted to know from somewhere behind them.

Zak lifted his head, looked over Dorian’s shoulder to where Bull was standing, a pair of trousers in hand and a moderately hurt expression on his craggy face - being Bull had been a Qunari spy, he couldn’t tell was if it was faked or not. “Do you _want_ me to offer hugs?” he asked.

“Oh, fuck yeah,” Bull said. “There’s no hugging in the Qun.”

It struck deep in his belly, something that he should have known or at least guessed, and still hit far too close to home. There had been no hugging in the Underdark, either, and it had made him cautious about asking people here for something he came to realize he needed a great deal more than sex and pleasure.

He gave Dorian one last squeeze, nudged him back, and it probably said a great deal about the relationships between all three of them that Dorian went without so much as a word. He stood carefully, drew off the purple blanket and left it in a heap on the chair behind him, and took two careful steps. And he didn’t so much _embrace_ Bull as fall against him and let the big qunari catch him.

Bull wasn’t quite as warm as Dorian, and that probably came from the fact he wandered around without a shirt. But there was a solid strength to him, something that was more than just the muscle and smooth skin pressed against him, and he was surprisingly gentle in pulling him closer.

“Welcome to the hug club,” Zak murmured, leaning against him, arms not quite all the way around him. “Platonic comfort with no questions asked.”

“Yeah, this is a thing that can happen again,” Bull agreed, voice a deep rumble in his chest that sounded like the purring of an enormous cat.

He smiled as he rested his forehead against Bull’s chest, drew in a deep breath and gathered himself to deal with the fact the only reason he wasn’t pressing nearly as much skin against Bull in turn was because the shirt came down to his knees - maybe it _was_ one of Bull’s, for special occasions? Blessed Andraste, and he’d thought the cold had numbed his mind; the warmth, the affection, turned everything thick and lazy around him, until even the Anchor was only a dull, throbbing ache instead of a sharp pain. It told him that he was safe, and that he could trust, and rest. “I need a nap,” he admitted.

“No reason why you shouldn’t,” Dorian said briskly, laying a hand on his shoulder and tugging him away from Bull to hand him a pair of loose trousers. When he stared at them and tried to remember how they went on, Dorian had pity on him and took them back, held them open, and nudged at him until he lifted his foot and slid it in; Bull steadied his shoulder as he shifted and got the other foot in. “That and about a handful of potions should finish closing these-” through the shirt, he prodded at the slashes down his back, and Zak winced as pain flared through them again, a different, unwelcome kind of heat. “And deal with the frostbite. And if you can’t feel it,” he added, a bit of cutting patience, “it’s worse than you think.”

“And not as though we haven’t dealt with Fade Rift crap without you before,” Bull said. “And this one didn’t even spew out political intrigue with the demons,” he added, sounding just about as grateful as Zak felt.

Zak considered as he batted Dorian’s hands away and dealt with the laces on his own, mostly to prove that he could: it wasn’t the prettiest knot ever tied, particularly by a Dalish, but it was a knot.

By now Cassandra would have herded the rest of the wounded and the squads of soldiers back over the pass; they might already be back in Skyhold. If there was one thing Josephine and Cullen were good at, it was organizing the Inquisition in peace and at war. He was fairly sure the mages and other researchers were happiest when he gave them something disreputable from a Rift or a demon and left them alone to experiment on it. He was damn well sure Adan wanted him dosed to the gills and sleeping. After this long without him, the Inquisition would run smooth enough another day, without needing his immediate input.

He could just close his eyes and rest, safe in Skyhold and the Inquisition.

And the nightmares that lurked just behind him would flow over his skin until it didn’t matter how warm and dry he was, he’d be cold again, hands wet with blood and grief in his throat. His son, who would wake any minute now because he simply had to, would wake alone, surrounded by strangers and abandoned in a strange land.

“I can think of a few good reasons why I shouldn’t,” he said. “Give me something that will keep me on my feet. At least for a little while longer,” he said, shrugging.

He more felt than saw Dorian and Bull exchange a look, something in the air crackling between them and just above him. “There’s…let’s call it, _not the recommended way to drink Antivan coffee_ ,” Dorian said slowly. “Used to drink it to stay awake for lectures.”

“I thought you were kicked out of every college in Tevinter,” Zak said.

“Yes,” Dorian admitted without a shred of remorse, “but not for missing my afternoon lectures.” Zak could almost feel him studying him again, another lingering assessment, much the same as the one he’d done in the bailey. “It’ll keep you on your feet for a couple of hours,” he said, “but then you’ll be flat on your ass.”

“Which is where everyone says I should be anyways,” Zak pointed out. Including his own body, which was busy tallying up how long he’d been standing without support and explaining to him why that was a bad idea. He gingerly felt back for the chair, setting a hand on the back of it for balance. “I just need to see about one of the wounded,” he said softly.

Dorian met his eyes, and something dark and sober passed over his expression, the look of a mage - a man - who’d just done some basic math and didn’t quite like the result he’d gotten. “Alright,” he finally said. “Let me just rummage around and see what Cabot has on hand.” He stepped back and curved around to the other side of the hearth and towards the bar on the back wall.

Hearing him rattling around among the bottles behind the bar, Zak decided - as much as he could decide anything just now - that he may as well not fall over while he waited, and sat back down. “So, chess tournament?” he asked, picking at the bandages on his left hand, fairly sure he didn’t want to know what was underneath them and yet morbidly curious. “Tell me Solas didn’t get you with that Pawn-Mage gambit again.”

“Nah,” Bull said, leaning back against one of the supporting pillars, tips of his horns scraping as they brushed against the ceiling. “I mean, you know that was at least half a point about the Qun.”

Zak smiled, and if he closed his eyes he could see the pair of them, bickering through chess in the Emerald Graves; Bull on edge because he’d just been declared Tal-Valshoth, Solas on edge because they’d been in the Emerald Graves and every elf in the forward camps had been on edge. The pair of them had taken the most unlikely moments of respite to play chess without a board: lounging on rocks next to the waterfall after closing two Rifts; under the massive grave-marker trees that gave the Emerald Graves its name; among the ruin they’d cheerfully made of the Veridium mine. Not quite good days, but better.

“Who’s winning now?” he asked, wanting to chase those good memories just a little longer.

“Who do you think?” Bull asked.

It took him another moment to realize Bull actually meant the question as a question, and underlying it was a little bit of a needle to keep his brain working and keep him awake. Not that it took much doing, with this topic, even if Varric hadn’t given him an entertaining rundown earlier. “Cullen. I mean,” he added, managing a smile as if this was the only thing he had to worry about today, “since I wasn’t here.”

“And you complain about my lack of humility,” Dorian commented as he came back around into the warm nook and handed Zak a steaming mug.

“You’re confusing me with Cassandra again,” he said, and rotated the mug in his hand; it was warm enough that he could feel it through the bandages, and made the Anchor ease a little. He sniffed at the curl of steam: coffee, of course, strong and bitter, but somehow citrus cut through it. “What’s in it?” he asked warily.

“If you have to ask,” Dorian said patiently, “you really don’t want to know.”

“Please don’t be raw lyrium,” he murmured, and took a wary sip: hot, bitter coffee, a good shot of brandy, and something that put his teeth on edge but happily cleared his mind without him needing to hold hard to the thoughts. He sipped again, and felt his toes tingle. “I need dry socks,” he realized, and felt absurdly proud of his critical thinking ability. A pair landed neatly in his lap, and he shifted the mug to work them over his feet one-handedly, the thick wool just a little scratchy with newness, but so damn warm he hadn’t realized he’d still been cold.

A few more sips, and he handed the mug back to Dorian feeling almost back normal - even with the Anchor aching. He didn’t feel as though he had to brace himself to grab his boots and shove his feet into them. “Dorian, you were holding out on us,” he said.

“Yes, I was such a terrible person to not dose everyone with a blood lotus extract at regular intervals,” he retorted, something between his usual wry quips and truly annoyed.

Zak lifted his head, his heel dropping heavily into the boot. “Doesn’t blood lotus cause hallucinations?”

“Which means that right now you’re hallucinating you’re fully awake due to the coffee,” Dorian explained.

Because that actually made sense, Dorian was probably right and he _was_ hallucinating. But as long as he was hallucinating energy and a cleared mind, he’d take it - once. “That explains why it’s going to hit hard when it wears off in a few hours,” he said wryly, standing. “And you were right - I was happier not knowing what was in it.”

Dorian sniffed, but seemed at least somewhat mollified, and handed Zak a shirt that wouldn’t drown him. As he changed, he flexed his left hand as best he could through the bandages, trying to convince both him and it that everything was just fine and it didn’t need to throb with pain. On the other hand, not even Dorian’s dubious potion changed the fact that he’d opened two Fade Rifts and closed one of them: and while he knew that the act of opening and closing Rifts caused the ache, he had to figure that the sheer math of those Rifts kept him achingly aware of the Anchor on his palm.

The Fade Rift left open in Faerun was a problem for another time; his concern was for the part of Faerun he’d brought through. “I need to check on the wounded - and get more elfroot for this,” he said, lifting his bandaged in all the explanation that was needed.

“As you said,” Dorian said, too casually to be about the elfroot, too much keenness in his eyes as he studied him; likewise Bull, still leaning patiently against the wall, was watching him a little too closely, and his expression was so similar to Jarlaxle’s he had to remind himself that he really had lost an eye and didn’t use an eyepatch as a fashionable, magical, statement. “We’ll talk some more later, when you’re upright under your own power.”

It was as good as he was going to get, but he lingered a moment longer, in the warmth of the tavern, between the two of them. “Thank you,” he added quietly.

Bull lifted a shoulder. “Don’t mention it, boss,” he said.

“You’ve done the exact same for us,” Dorian added softly. “A fact I’ll remind you of next time you drag me halfway up a mountain,” he added, a bit of his usual tartness. “Go on,” he added, waving a hand towards the door. “That potion won’t last forever.”

Because he was right, about so many things, Zak just smiled as he inclined his head, almost the same bow the Orlesian courtiers had given him, and followed the cord tugging around his heart.


	10. Now: Skyhold

He really could walk to the surgery blind and half-dead, and tried to be glad that he didn’t have to this time. He stepped inside, and the smell hit him first, even before his eyes adjusted to the comparative darkness: even more than the copper scent of blood and the too-sweet scent of too many potions, was the bitter iron of pain. He, happily, hadn’t often been treated in this place, but that scent shuddered down through him with familiarity.

It wasn’t a large space; only the most critically injured needed the surgeon’s attention, and the rest of the wounded could be treated in camps and in quarters. It was also almost empty, and that was its own small mercy after the frantic skirmish today. He walked down the aisle between the two rows of beds, elevated well off the floor, well-spaced so a surgeon could attend their patient from either side. Or, in this case, so that curtains could be drawn around one of them to contain infection, or for privacy.

He walked around the curtain screen, and Louise de Motte, their Orlesian surgeon, looked up from where she was applying a thick blue potion directly onto Drizzt’s wound. The light from the lantern set on the chest of supplies next to her glinted off her silver mask, cast with a sober expression, over the long white gown the surgeons and healers wore as a uniform, and over Drizzt’s dark skin, streaked with sweat. 

“He’d hate this,” he murmured. Being all-but-naked and vulnerable and wounded and prodded by strangers - it wasn’t even a mercy that he still wasn’t awake to realize it. Zak saw, heart sinking further, that beneath closed lids, his eyes darted frantically, an expression of pain briefly twisting his face, one that had nothing to do with Louise’s touch.

“Is he-” he started to ask, looking back at Louise.

“Sit down,” she ordered.

He shook his head, even if there was a chair right there at Drizzt’s other side. “I’m fine,” he said.

“You are not,” she said, high-class Orelsian accent more pronounced than normal. “But as I am more concerned with this wound at the moment, you can sit down and wait your turn. Inquisitor,” she added, the title for politeness almost as an afterthought.

He was, occasionally, capable of recognizing walls when he hit them. Zak sat down, drawing the chair a little closer to Drizzt’s head, reaching out to tug the sheet a little closer to the hollow of his throat. Perhaps it was folly - Louise had to fold back so much of it to deal with the thigh wound - but he thought Drizzt might prefer it, and he had to be cold from the mountain snow. 

Or should have been, if his skin wasn’t hot with fever. “How is he?” he asked again, glancing down at what he could see of the wound: it was almost as black as his skin, something dripping from it that assuredly was not blood and was too viscous to be the potion that Louise had poured on.

“The wound itself is not severe,” Louise said, using a cotton square to press onto the wound. Her mask barely moved as she lifted the square and examined the black smear on it, her voice so steady he heard only a trace of a frown in it. “I have never seen the like of this poison before, but it is responding to a basic anti-toxin, and I believe would respond better when Adan returns and can consult on some of the more… exotic options.” She dropped the scrap of cloth into the bag at her side and drew out another, tracing it all the way through the wound. “Once cleansed, it will need stitches, but seems as though elfroot salve should prove effective.”

Reminded, and not very well able to do anything else now, he twisted in his chair and sorted through the bottles on the dresser at his back; every bed had a selection of common potions next to it, just for these emergencies. The bottle of distilled elfroot was vividly green, green as the Fade Rift, and smelled a little of mint and rain when he popped the cork. He set it on the shelf next to him, braced himself, and unwound the bandages around his left hand.

Beneath them, his palm was normal - at least, as normal as it could be with the Anchor seething green in the middle of it, and it certainly hurt in the center, radiating out to aches at the edges of his hand and down into his wrist, but that was almost normal as well. No dripping poison or infection, no gashes, not even an unusual size or shape to the Anchor. It was a crippling relief.

He couldn’t help the hiss of pain and relief as he poured a measure of elfroot directly onto his palm and it instantly numbed the hot, swollen flesh under and around the Anchor; he just felt guilty about it when he looked over at his son. “And the fact he hasn’t woken?” he asked, working the salve into his palm.

“That is, unfortunately, a different matter than the wound,” she said, and this time he did hear the sigh in her steady voice. “We have seen similar in other fights with Despair demons - you know,” she said, and her head tipped, the unchanging expression of the mask seeming to suggest an arched eyebrow. “But it has never been this protracted.”

“Could the poison…” Zak began, frowning as he flexed his left hand, thinking it through. The Anchor crackled softly, casting a green tinge over the white sheet, over Louise’s mask, making faint shadows ripple on the wall behind her before it finally - _finally_ \- faded into a streak of green on his palm. “He was also wounded within the Fade,” he said slowly.

There was no way for the mask to hide her wince. “That kind of spirit-wound is beyond my abilities,” she said regretfully. “I will consult with Adan, and your mage Solas, but it might be there is little any of us can do for it: he may well be in Andraste’s hands.”

Zak didn’t bother hide his wince, either, watching Drizzt’s contorted expression. He himself had come back spirit-wounded from Adamant, from the Fade, but those had been caused by a Fear Demon, not Despair, and had been complicated by the return of his memories - _all_ his memories. The knowledge of the Underdark - and just who he’d been - had fed into the wounds. He’d been unsettled, unable to sleep without nightmares, but at least he’d been awake and able to fight, and at least try to help himself heal. 

Not dropped into this unnatural sleep that so clearly tormented but unable to be woken from.

And he hadn’t been stuck at a bedside, all his power as Inquisitor and a warrior utterly useless. “What if he doesn’t wake?” he asked softly, the worry that had been chasing him since the end of the battle sounding fragile in the stillness of the surgery.

Louise looked up again, and even through the narrow eyeholes, he could see the same worry reflected in her eyes. But she’d been a trained surgeon for longer than he’d been Inquisitor, and all she said was: “That is a matter we will consider in due course of time.”

It was a hesitation of an answer, a parry that only deflected and kept them on even footing, but he knew it was the only answer she could give. “I want him moved to my quarters,” he said. “If he can be moved,” he added, about as much prevaricating as he’d tolerate on the matter. He didn’t want his son to suffer, and maybe the surroundings weren’t causing the dreams or visions that tormented him, but he damn well didn’t want Drizzt waking in this place. Not when there was an alternative.

And he was _going_ to wake up.

If Louise thought of all the steps between the Great Hall and his quarters at the top of the tower, she didn’t mention them. “When this is stitched and bandaged, yes, he can be moved,” she said. “He has been moved this far already, and it has not harmed him more than he already is,” she added, almost shrugging. She turned back to the wound, but before she lifted another tool, she looked back at him. “If you are staying until that point,” she said, “you should eat something. There is soup there,” she said, nodding towards the door to the little workroom where medicines were distilled and apparently soup made.

Under the pleasant haze of Dorian’s potion, Zak knew he was tired, and was sure he was hungry. He just didn’t feel any of it. Still, Louise’s order might have carried _keep out of my way_ underneath it, but she hadn’t banished him to deal with everything else he probably should be dealing with.

So he followed her orders and got up to pour himself a bowl of the soup; it did take a few moments in the crowded workroom to sort out what was potion and what was soup, because even the scent didn’t quite help.

Bowl of soup in hand, he settled back at Drizzt’s side and sniffed a little closer at the bowl; and the richness of the caramelized onions seasoned with a considerable amount of pepper and thyme was actually appealing - even if Louise clearly stuck to the classic recipe for Orlesian onion soup, not the Fereldan interpretation that put toast and cheese on top to horrify their once-oppressors. The first spoonful hit his empty stomach in much the same way that the elfroot had on his hand, instantly soothing. He ate without looking away from Louise’s ministrations, faster than was normally polite, and lifted the bowl to drink the last dregs directly.

By that point, she had finished cleaning Drizzt’s wound, and if it was still ugly and deep, at least it wasn’t dripping black poison. He watched, biting his tongue to keep from issuing orders he had no business issuing, as she threaded a needle and made the first stitch; she knew her business, had trained in Val Royeaux to do far more than merely stitch a wound closed, had done so much more for various members of the Inquisition.

He just was incapable of being anything like neutral or disinterested in this, when every little noise from Drizzt - half-choked noises of pain that didn’t come with the piercing of the needle through the edge of the wound - had him on edge, guilt and anger twisting around his heart.

His fault. No, he knew that wasn’t fair: if he hadn’t opened the Rift in Faerun, they’d have died in that ruined castle, overwhelmed by far too many demons. They were both alive, and that counted for something.

But no matter how grateful he was to be home, surrounded by the Inquisition, Drizzt was still unconscious and having his leg stitched up. And all he could do was sit at his side and bear witness, eyes moving over his face, searching for a way he might fight off whatever demons hounded his son. And do nothing.

“Alright,” Louise said as she finished smearing elfroot over Drizzt’s wound, more than he’d used on the Anchor, and neatly bandaging the wound and her stitches. “Your turn now.”

He’d been quite content to forget about that part. “They’re not bad,” he said, but reached for the hem of the borrowed shirt - because by now, the entire surgeon corps at Skyhold had him very well trained.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she informed him, and circled behind him as he did as she ordered and removed the shirt.

The hairs on the back of his neck prickled to have her standing there, quiet and just out of reach, something that was only a presence but was almost worse for that. He hadn’t thought the sense memory would be quite so strong, but he could almost hear a whip hissing on the ground behind him, and his bare back tightened, bracing for the pain to come.

And it did, flaring hot down the lines of the slashes as Louise laid a finger alongside one. But it wasn’t her fault, he reminded himself, setting his teeth. She wasn’t a priestess, and this wasn’t Menzoberranzan, and while he would admit that he’d gotten these through his own stupidity, they hadn’t come from a whip and an uncertain temper.

“The potion you drank is already starting to close these,” she said, and stepped back. “I’ll bandage them for the night, but drink another and they should be healed by morning. They may not even scar,” she added as she circled back around to study the collection of potions in the workroom.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Zak had to murmur.

“So it seems,” Louise said quietly, coming back to his side. She pressed a slim bottle into his hands and started laying linen pads over the slashes and winding bandages around his chest to hold them in place.

Zak looked down at the bottle and grimaced on reflex before easing the cork out and throwing back the potion in one long swallow: it was thick down his throat, and he didn’t know what quirk of fate or healer perversity made it so that healing potions never tasted good, but he wished them all to the Nine Hells and the Void beside. But if his skin shuddered at the taste, it also prickled, something not quite cold and not quite pain, fanning out from the slashes and prickling in his ears, his hands, places he hadn’t thought he still hurt but evidently did.

In a few minutes, it faded, and Louise stepped back, done with her bandaging job, the linen wrapping snug around his skin but not uncomfortable; when he put his shirt on over them, they were nothing more than a little pressure when he took too deep a breath. “I’ll find stretcher-bearers for him,” Louise said, and behind her mask, she sounded exhausted, or perhaps merely sad. She started towards the door, but then paused and looked back at him. “Whoever he is to you,” she said quietly, “I’m sorry.”

She meant it kindly, but she didn’t know just how accurate her words were. He tried not to wince as he nodded, tried not to grieve too openly because _who he is to you_ was a matter they hadn’t settled, even if he knew what he wanted the answer to be. “Thank you,” he said softly instead.

Louise left him with a swish of her skirts, and Zak sat back in the chair, feeling Dorian’s potion ebbing, his blood cooling and slowing. “I’ll have to tell him soup undoes it,” he murmured in the quiet of the surgery. And regretted the words, the instinctive quip, when he looked back at Drizzt, still restlessly sleeping, caught in the wounds of the Despair demon. Louise hadn’t bothered to pull the sheet back over his leg; he did so, gently, as if settling the folds around him would wake him and that was something to regret instead of celebrate.

His son. His fault. At least in just the same way that Drizzt’s suspicions were his fault. But those suspicions still hurt, just as having what he’d done, things he couldn’t change - and didn’t want to - thrown in his face. 

And yet even with those, it still hurt more to watch Drizzt suffer. If this was penance for those deeds, he’d drop to his knees before Andraste or the Dread Wolf or whichever Faerun god he’d pissed off, and pray for forgiveness, give them whatever they demanded. Even if his son wasn’t grateful for his efforts afterwards; that wasn’t the point.

He’d never asked for forgiveness, certainly never expected it, not from the gods and not from Drizzt. Just for his son not to be punished for _his_ crimes.

And for him to be judged for what he’d done since; it couldn’t pay for what he’d done, as if one good deed erased one bad one, but nor did those bad deeds erase the good he’d done. It had taken him a long time to understand that, to truly believe it, after the spirits trapped by the Nightmare had restored his memories.

Everything he’d done in the Underdark was true. But so was everything he’d done since.

And his son didn’t see that, didn’t want to acknowledge that. But even in spite of it, Zak couldn’t help what he felt, couldn’t help trying, or hoping.

He’d died for his son. Even with all he’d done while leading the Inquisition and saving Thedas, he still counted that his finest act. How could he not, when it was the one selfless thing he’d done, driven solely by love? And that love meant he had to hope.

The door opened, and he looked up at the sight of a handful of Inquisition soldiers filing quietly into the surgery after Louise. They didn’t salute, except by quick nods and murmurs of his title. He stood, got out of their way, and let them handle the logistics of moving Drizzt back onto a stretcher.

Watching them, he was reminded that it was a _very_ long way up to his quarters, and more stairs and uneven ground than anyone should be carried over, and certainly it was far away from Louise and Adan and even Solas, if they needed to check on him…

“You were right,” Louise said, cutting through his thoughts, undoubtedly reading some of them on his face. “He’ll be more comfortable in the bed there, certainly kept quieter. And,” she added, her voice brightening a little with a mischievous undercurrent, “you’ll be more comfortable on the couch there, too.”

Maker’s breath, was he that obvious? Looking into the eyes of the Inquisition soldiers who didn’t quite meet his gaze and didn’t quite look at Drizzt even as they negotiated holds, Zak had to figure that he was. And he’d worry about just what they thought his relationship with Drizzt was later. After he woke up.

He almost thought being moved onto a stretcher would have woken anyone, even someone with spirit-wounds. Maybe he’d only hoped it, that his fears could be put to rest in an instant. But though Drizzt gave a little gasp of pain, not quite thrashing, as he was lifted, his eyes remained closed, still moving behind the lids in a way that should be comforting, should be proof that he lived, if Zak didn’t know full well that he was in no pleasant dream, but a nightmare.

“I’ll lead the way,” he said when the soldiers had picked up their burden, and strode for the door. He probably didn’t need to; even if few were invited to his tower, everyone knew the door that led to it. But the alternative was trailing behind them, like a mourner after a bier.

At least this way he could even pretend that he was being useful, opening doors for them and clearing a path. At least, as much as he could, when regardless of his unsettled and unhappy thoughts, the worry roiling in his gut, he was still the Inquisitor, and if people bowed at his approach, they also came up to inquire about orders or particular problems.

He stepped out of the surgery and got three paces towards the main keep before Cullen strode up, heavy cloak billowing out with every long stride, reports in hand. “There you are, Zak,” he said, somewhat harried. “The rest of the skirmishers have reported back in from the pass and we’ve closed the gates for the night.”

Before Cullen could get farther, or thrust those reports at him, Zak shook his head. “Thank you - but I’ll hear the rest of that tomorrow. Please,” he added, quieter, a little of the emotion too close to his skin bubbling up into his throat.

Whatever formality that had been between them had long been washed away with blood, and while Cullen was a very good Commander, he was also the one who’d given him a copy of the Canticle of Trials, understanding what it was to carry a weight on his shoulders. “Of course,” he said, quieter. “If you can’t come to the War Room, we’ll make other arrangements to convene.” He smiled, just a little, tugging at the scar that split his upper lip. “You’ve been greatly missed.”

“And that means there’s a great deal to be done now I’m back,” he said quietly, knowingly. There was a corner of him that itched to hear the reports regardless, wanted to hear how his people and his home had been, even if there was nothing to report but routine patrols and caravans and diplomats, the daily life of Skyhold. “I’ll need the work,” he admitted, because Cullen, too, would be the first to understand burying pain in work. “But…”

Cullen only nodded, then reached out and set a hand - warmer than Bull’s, just as sword-callused - on his shoulder. “But not tonight,” he agreed, and stepped back.

Cullen was more than capable of keeping order in the garrison for one night, and they both knew it. It still was one more regret that dogged his heels as he headed towards the flight of stairs sweeping up to the main door of the keep. He used them every day, but this time he felt each step as he climbed. On the landing, he looked back at the stretcher-bearers, frowning and trying to think through the sheer logistics of carrying someone up these steps. But that wasn’t his job, and he knew he was dwelling on it to keep his mind from circling back to who they were carrying.

It was bad enough when he climbed the second flight of steps, opened the door to the keep, and felt himself swallowed up by the main hall. In the dark, it was cavernous, the ceiling lost in shadows overhead. Illusion, he knew, and not one of magic, but of the architecture of light and shadow; even in normal times, the light from the chandeliers seemed muted, solitary pools along the floor, so that the only source of light seemed to be from the enormous stained-glass windows that covered the back wall.

And illuminated the throne in front of it. 

In spite of himself, he walked slowly down the main hall, past the fireplace where Varric usually held his own court, past the doors to the library and the War Room on the right and left, until he stood before the dais and the throne.

_His_ throne.

He’d never before felt small in this room. Perhaps because he’d first seen it when it was still a moldering ruin. Perhaps because to his darksight, the height of it seemed airy rather than oppressive. He’d been more uneasy in the starburst-backed throne worked with the symbol of the Inquisition, but that had been sensing, even without his memories, that he’d once stood on the opposite side of a throne and had felt its cruel power.

He’d done what he could to make his throne a seat of justice, and occasionally managed mercy along with it. And, feeling the presence of it looming in front of him, he felt compelled to be honest. The thought that rolled through his head was selfish, and he hated it even as it crystallized: _this is not how I wanted this to happen._

Not that he’d had time to think, when he’d opened the Fade Rift. That had been merely a chance, a hope. But he _had_ dreamed of coming home, those long nights in Drizzt’s house on Faerun, dreamed of walking under this ceiling, standing before these windows, sitting in his throne, his place, and watching the Inquisition rippling through the hall, a glory of colors and strength.

Not returning in pain, with the soft footfalls of the soldiers behind him carrying his son’s body.

He turned away from the throne, and opened the unguarded, unlocked door on the left-wall. Behind it was a simple, unadorned staircase, one that climbed up in a square spiral along the inside of the tower wall, and he started up. The sound of the soldiers’ boots on the wood steps made him vaguely uneasy as he climbed, the echoes of them like being chased and hunted in the Underdark; he picked up his pace and didn’t know if it was from eagerness to reach the top, or to escape them.

He made the last turn, and a stone wall rose at his left hand, the passage momentarily claustrophobic, but his heart lifted as he climbed the last flight, these stairs stone instead of wood. There was no actual door to his quarters; at the top, the stairs simply opened up into the room at the top of the tower.

Even ruined, it had been more and better than he’d ever had in the Underdark, and now that he’d lived here for several years, it was _his_. The desk in one corner, piled with scrolls and papers as if he’d just come back from dinner; the fire in the fireplace crackling, the halla statue on the mantelpiece seeming to dance in the shadows and the light; the chessboard set with a problem on the little table next to the couch waiting for his touch. All his, fairly earned.

But best, light - once uncomfortable for a drow - poured in from the leaded windows along all three walls; their top arches were more stained glass, adding drops of glowing color along the floor and walls. A breeze stirred through the room, rustled the papers on his desk and made sparks dance in the fire; the doors to both the balconies had propped open to let in the evening air, and let him catch glimpses of Skyhold around him.

It had taken him some time to be used to the open air around him, the space, but he’d come to enjoy it, whether standing on a balcony and listening to the birds and the Chant from the inner garden below, or just catching impressions of the world around his tower as he worked. He’d had the space and privacy he’d so long craved without even having words for what he wanted, without being locked away in the dark.

But just now he stood in the center of his quarters, atop the symbol of the Inquisition woven in gold through the red rug, and watched the squad of soldiers gently lay Drizzt in the large, canopied bed. And all he felt was alone and cold, cut off from the world around him, and if it was at least in part by his own choosing, that didn’t change the fact it was no comfort now.

The soldiers worked the stretcher out from under Drizzt’s body, and he dismissed them with a nod; their footsteps going down echoed almost as much as they had coming up.

Alone, cold, he turned to follow them: his place was down below, sorting out patrols and sending mages out to prod at the Veil where the Fade Rift had been. He made it a single step, before guilt drew him back, twisting a spiral through the room to draw what comfort he could from the familiar, and ultimately drawn back to the bed.

It was one thing for him to feel alone, but even knowing there was nothing the surgeon could do, that there hadn’t been time for one of their mages to be consulted, he felt as much as saw Drizzt in the over-large bed, unsettled and in pain. Unconscious, Drizzt wouldn’t know if he was alone or not, but that didn’t matter: he couldn’t abandon his son.

Zak took a seat on the couch; he lasted all of a minute before he was up again, pacing over to the bed. Drizzt was in the center of it, laid out atop the red and gold coverlet, the sheet from the surgery draped half-haphazardly over his body; undoubtedly so Louise would have easy access to the wound, when she inevitably came to change the bandages and check the stitches.

And yet, the room was cold. There was still the gleam of sweat on Drizzt’s skin, but Zak knew - he was the only one who’d know - the warmth of the fire never seemed to reach all the way across the room. He was tired, Dorian’s potion wearing off, and it took work to ease out the red and gold coverlet from under Drizzt without disturbing him - if it could. Certainly he moaned faintly, head tipping away, but Zak couldn’t know if that was from having the blanket tugged out from under him, his leg jarred, or whatever nightmare chased him.

He couldn’t know if spreading the blanket over him helped, but it eased something inside him. He sat on the edge of the bed a moment longer, not quite a memory lurking in the shadows of his mind: he’d never had this with Drizzt. And he hadn’t thought it strange; what drow father ever saw their offspring? The closest he’d had was those years of training Drizzt before Melee-Magthere; even then, he’d tried to keep a distance between them, even when more than a small part of him ached to draw closer. He’d thought he’d get his heart broken, to love someone and find that they were just another drow - he had in the past, after all. But he hadn’t dreamed that some miracle had made Drizzt more like him.

Maybe it was too late; maybe he’d lost the right to any kind of softness towards his son now, after all those years when he’d made sure that they were only master and student. But he couldn’t seem to stop himself.

He reached out to draw the cover a little higher over Drizzt’s shoulders -

\- Blood on his hands. A moment, just a moment, where Drizzt turned his head and was laying in just the same position, and a ghost of a shadow had him seeing that ugly wound opening his neck.

His belly tightened, the comfort of the soup sickening, Zak pushed himself to his feet. He lifted a shaking hand, shoved it through his hair as he paced back and forth through the tower room, stairs to balcony door and back. He could have done nothing else; he knew it had been a demon, that he’d had no choice. It didn’t seem to matter.

However tired he was, he didn’t want to sleep, not with that image entirely too fresh in his mind. Not knowing, terribly, that all dreamers went to the Fade in sleep.

Instead, Zak circled around to his desk, running his fingers along the spines of the books in the shelves behind it, along the glossy top of the desk and the back of the chair. From here, he could sit and familiarize himself with the reports left for him in his absence, and all he had to do was look up to see Drizzt in the bed, reassure himself that he was still there, still breathed. It wouldn’t be the first night he spent working; the dark didn’t bother him, not when he only needed the starlight to read reports and write orders. It was the only reason he was grateful to be drow. 

But he lifted the first sheet of paper, and he knew there was writing on it, careful lines of text. He probably even read it, top to bottom, at least once. And he hadn’t the faintest idea of what it was about, much less if he had a recommendation. He set it aside, tried another, and this one, he couldn’t even tell if it had writing on it or not; his eyes were for the bed, ears pricked for the slightest rustle, the faintest exhale.

There was an active Fade Rift on Faerun. Undoubtedly he needed to plan for how they were going to deal with it; at the very least he needed to write his own report on where he’d been and what he’d done in the last month. He drew a clean sheet of paper towards him, picked up a pen and dipped it in the ink - and only managed a blotch in the top corner.

If words failed him for this, at least he probably had a better cause: how did one explain that he’d been brought to another world, and escaped it by ripping open the Fade and physically stepping through, with his son in tow? That he’d done so deliberately, creating another Breach and bringing demons to another world, all just to cover their escape? For all the good it had done.

“Icefall, snowfall, pine forest at night, a panther’s steps leading him to the burning cabin where she waits but she’s not there,” a whispery voice said, just at his shoulder.

Zak was beyond being able to be startled by it. Or by the pot of tea that had somehow appeared at his elbow, along with a dog-eared copy of _Hard in Hightown_. “Hello, Cole,” he said. “Come to help?”

Cole was still wearing the hat, big as Jarlaxle’s, even indoors; Zak had only ever caught glimpses of his straw hair, only hints of the shadowed, tired eyes in the thin, pale, too-young face. He was also beyond asking how Cole had gotten up here without him seeing, without hearing his steps on the stairs or seeing his shadow move on the balcony. Cole was…Cole. Even after he’d chosen to make himself more human than Fade spirit, he was better at going unnoticed than any drow, and for far better reasons.

“I want to try,” Cole said. “I see him bleeding, deep where no one knows, but I cannot reach into him anymore and he cannot hear me. I could shout in his ear?”

Zak smiled, felt it ease something in his face, around his hands. “I don’t expect it would be that simple.”

“Probably not. Maidens wake with a kiss but the love’s never true and turn the story into darkness,” he said, depressingly cheerfully. His head cocked again, considering Drizzt. “He dreams of a woman with two faces and a father with none.”

Zak sighed. “That sounds about right.” In a more uncharitable moments, he wondered why Drizzt dreamed of him at all, why he didn’t simply believe he’d sprung forth fully formed onto the surface, or that the dwarf patriarch had made him out of clay. If love hurt, so did having it ignored, but that wasn’t something even Cole could fix.

Instead, Zak tapped Varric’s book, apparently the copy that had made the rounds of the Inquisition. “Is this for me?” he asked, somewhat rhetorically.

“They’re not real, the ones inside the book,” Cole said. “But the story’s more than real. It’s like the Fade when it shows how things _should_ be.”

It was also not nearly so complex that he would be distracted by it when he wanted to keep watch, but it would give him something outside his skin to focus on. Reading for pleasure was another of those curiosities he hadn’t quite gotten used to, like enjoying the light on his skin when he woke. And, setting his hand on the softened cover, thumb rubbing over the pages that everyone in the Inquisition had touched, this book in particular was almost a bond with everyone here.

“The light glints on the empty throne,” Cole said, even quieter than he usually did. “Whispers around the hall, who are we now without him to give us a name and a purpose?”

Sometimes Cole was unsettling, particularly when he dipped into someone’s mind and pulled out pieces of pain - they’d both been wildly confused by what he said when he’d done so before Zak got his memories back. The part that made it _unsettling_ instead of _cruel_ was that he only did so to help, to try and heal what was broken.

It also meant that it wasn’t so hard to understand him. “I’m glad I’m home, too,” Zak said quietly. Whatever hardness, whatever pain he carried back with him - he was home.

“Yes,” Cole agreed. “You want to be alone,” he added with slightly-less uncanny perception, and stepped back from the desk, towards the balcony.

Zak glanced down at the teapot. It was steaming, but only faintly, and there was a smudge of red paint along the white porcelain handle. “Did you steal this from Solas?” he had to ask.

“It’s harder because I can’t make people forget, but he never remembers his tea even when he asks for it,” Cole said, all the answer that was truly needed. He slipped into the shadows, and Zak knew even those with pale skin could vanish into them as well as a black-skinned drow, but it was always a surprise when Cole did. Mostly because even now, there was always just a moment when he _did_ forget, when it seemed impossible that anyone had been here but him.

But he’d been here. And for just that little bit, he hadn’t been alone. It had to be enough.

Zak shook his head and took the book and the teapot to the couch; settling in, he looked over at Drizzt one more time, then opened the book, and began the long vigil through the night. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was the last I finished during 2019's NaNoWriMo, when I began this project. Draft creep being what it is, updates to this will be more sporadic than they already have been. Thank you for your patience and interest thus far!


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